Читать бесплатно онлайн книгу автора  Princess Napraxine, Volume 3 (of 3)

Maria Louise Ramé

Princess Napraxine
III.

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DOROTHY FORSTER. By Walter Besant.

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A REAL QUEEN. By R. E. Francillon.

THE WAY OF THE WORLD. By David Christie Murray.

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Table of Contents

Chapter 34

1

Chapter 35

62

Chapter 36

92

Chapter 37

115

Chapter 38

136

Chapter 39

163

Chapter 40

179

Chapter 41

197

Chapter 42

226

Chapter 43

243

Chapter 44

257

Chapter 45

267

Chapter 46

270

Chapter 47

276

Chapter 48

284

Chapter 49

292

Chapter 50

315

Chapter 51

325

Chapter 52

327

Chapter 53

342

Chapter 54

354

Chapter 55

363

L’Envoi

375

Princess Napraxine

BY

OUIDA

IN THREE VOLUMES

VOL. III.

London

CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY

1884

[ All rights reserved ]

PRINCESS NAPRAXINE.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

When Yseulte had recovered enough to travel, he took her to the Italian lakes for awhile, to restore her to her usual health and strength, and distract her thoughts from what had befallen her at Amyôt. With the beginning of winter they returned, and made their home for awhile in the great hotel of the Boulevard St. Germain, which he hated, and where he intended to remain for the briefest time that could suffice for the fulfilment of those social duties of which Friederich Othmar never ceased to remind him. There his mother’s apartments had been prepared for his wife, and every grace and attraction that the art and the taste of the day could add to them had been added, as though the most solicitous affection had presided over the preparation of them. All the preferences she had shown in the country had been remembered and gratified; whatever she had liked best in colour, in treatment, in art, in flowers, in marble, had been consulted or reproduced in Paris; and even a large dog to which she had taken a fancy at Amyôt had been brought thence from the kennels, and was lying before the fire when she entered.

A much older and far wiser woman would have been persuaded to believe, as she believed, that in all this delicate prévenance for her pleasures and her preferences the tenderest love had spoken. She could not divine the self-reproach of her husband’s conscience, which made him sensible that he perforce denied her so much that was her due, and made him proportionately eager to atone for that denial by every material enjoyment and outward mark of affection and of homage. All those who surrounded him, all his acquaintances, his household, and his dependents, imagined that he loved his young wife. The person who was in nowise deceived was Friederich Othmar.

‘He is like a Sultan,’ thought the old man angrily, ‘a Sultan who loads the women of his zenana with ropes of pearls and emeralds as big as pigeon’s eggs, that they may not perceive that he only visits them twice a year!’

By the law of the attraction of contrasts, there had arisen a mutual attachment between her and Baron Fritz: the unscrupulous old man, for whom as for Turcaret the whole world was composed of shareholders, felt more reverence and tenderness for Yseulte than he ever felt in his life for anyone; and she, who only saw his devotion to Othmar, his admirable manners, his shrewd wit, and his paternal kindness to herself, grew fond of, and grateful to, him, and was wholly ignorant of that mercilessness and selfishness which would have immolated all mankind to the service of his personal ambitions, and to which all morality or humanity appeared as absurd as they did to Fouquet or to Talleyrand.

Friederich Othmar incessantly strove to inspire her with his own passion for the House he adored, and though he failed because she was too thoroughly patrician in all her instincts to easily welcome such impressions, and was more apt to share her husband’s disdain for all such ambitions, he did succeed in persuading her that the future content of Othmar himself would depend on the measure of the interest which he would take in those great fortunes of which he held the key.

‘Understand this, my child,’ he would say, ‘a man in old age never forgives himself for the occasions which he has let slip in youth; and every man who in youth is désœuvré, pays for it heavily when age has come. Otho is a clever man, but he has the sickness of his century; he is indifferent to everything’ (‘even to you!’ he thought impatiently). ‘We call it the malady of the time; I do not know that we are right. It existed in Petronius Arbiter’s, but it had no existence in our immediate forefathers’. However, you do not care for abstract discussions; you care for Otho. Well, let us confine ourselves to Otho. Nowadays, he is still a young man; he thinks he can afford to despise all things because he has strength, and health, and every form of enjoyment accessible to him—and he is certainly rich enough to play at cynicism all day if it amuse him most.’

‘He is no cynic,’ said Yseulte, quickly.

Baron Fritz smiled.

‘A little of Alceste, surely? You read “Le Misanthrope,” even at your convent, I imagine? My dear child, people always desire the fate they have not. Alfred de Vigny, with his sixteen quarterings, was always in rebellion against the fate of the poor gentleman; Otho, one of the richest men in Europe, is always rebelling against his riches as a chain and a species of dishonour. Now, it is for you to reconcile him to them; it is for you to persuade him that in the interests of his House lie those occupations and obligations which will not pall upon him as he grows older. I have known men weary of love and pleasure, but I have never known them weary of ambition. Otho scorns vulgar ambitions, but there are those which are not vulgar. In finance, as in life, there is no standing still. In his present mood he would be delighted if ruin were possible to us; it is not possible. Short of a European war that should last thirty years, nothing can harm us much. Still, no great house can long stand without a chief who cares for its welfare and honour. Like Catherine II., “je lis l’avenir dans le passé.” A wise statesman has always the past of the world spread out before him like an ordnance map for his guidance. So may we also, in the past history of such houses as our own, see what has led to their ruin, and so guide ourselves to avoid those evils in our own case. Now, nothing has been so commonly the cause of krach in financial establishments as their being afflicted with imprudent or indifferent members. Otho is not very often imprudent, but he is entirely indifferent. Certainly,’ continued the Baron, with pardonable pride, ‘the Maison d’Othmar is too solidly established, too greatly important to the public life of Europe, to be easily imperilled by a young man’s foibles. Still, I cannot disguise from myself the fact that when I am no more there will be no check on his eccentricities, no stimulus to his apathy. He will be ill served because he will at once expect too much virtue from men, and observe them with too little suspicion. The ship is sound and safe, and sure to have fair winds, but if the man at her helm be reading his Horace or his La Bruyère instead of steering by his chart, the ship may founder in clear weather and calm seas. You understand me?’

Metaphor was very unusual to him; he only condescended to use it for sake of making his meaning clearer to the feebleness of a feminine mind.

‘Yes, I understand quite well,’ she replied, with a little sigh. ‘But I have no influence; he would think me impertinent; and I am sure no one will care for the honour of the House more truly than he.’

‘Commercially speaking, there are two kinds of honour,’ said Friederich Othmar. ‘The fantastic and visionary one he will always maintain, but the practical one, which lies in doing your utmost for all the interests centred in yours, he will neglect. If I were to tell him that we must collapse to-morrow, he would give up everything, down to his pet edition of Marcus Aurelius, to satisfy our debts; but if I were to tell him also how many financial schemes and companies would fall with us, he would only reply that the world would be exceedingly well rid of so many scoundrels. The honour is safe with him, doubtless, but the welfare is not. I shall not live for ever; I shall probably only live a very few years more. You must persuade your husband that his true duties and pleasures will lie in those ambitions which his fathers have bequeathed to him. I know that he and you would like to extinguish the House of Othmar financially, and dwell at Amyôt with no remembrance of the world. That is a lover’s dream. My dear, simplicity and solitude are impossible in our society; a shepherd’s peace is not attainable by a man whom the world claims. If I were to die to-morrow, and Otho to remain as indifferent to his own interests as he is now, all that I have done, all that his predecessors have done, would crumble away in ten or twenty years like so much soft sandstone in a succession of wet winters. He would not resent it now, but when he should be fifty years old he would resent it bitterly; he would never pardon himself. It is from this possibility that your influence must protect him.’

She hesitated, with a blush upon her face.

‘I have no influence,’ she said timidly. ‘He knows so much better, so much more than I——’

‘Obtain influence over him,’ said the old man curtly; ‘for if you do not, someone else will. Nay, my dear, pardon me; do not be hurt by my plain speaking. Such men as Otho are always influenced by women; he should be so now by you; he will be so if you will leave off worshipping him timidly, making him your law and your religion, and realise that you are an exquisitely lovely woman, with mind enough not to be the mere toy of any man. You are very young, it is true, but you have grown ten years in a few months. You must remember that to be in love is very agreeable, no doubt, but you are not his mistress; you are his wife. You must not think only of the immediate moment, but of the far future when he will not be in love with you, ma belle, nor you with him, but when you may still influence him nobly and wisely, and he may find in you his safest friend.’

Yseulte listened, with a little sigh.

It seemed to her as if all her happy illusions were taking wing, like the group of amorini which flew away from a weeping nymph on the ceiling of her room, which had been painted by Bourgereau. They were seated in one of her own apartments, a very bower of primroses and white lilac, panelled in the Louis Seize style, with Bourgereau’s charming children in groups within each panel above the satin couches. Between the curtains, there were glimpses through the windows of the cedars and wellingtonias of the gardens. Without, it was a chilly winter’s day, but within, it was warm as summer, mellow with soft colour, fragrant with innumerable flowers; even to this great hotel of the Boulevard S. Germain, which had always seemed to Othmar the most oppressive and detestable of all his many mansions, the advent of Yseulte had brought a grace and light and sweetness as of young and innocent life, a charm of home to these splendid and desolate suites of rooms. Her dogs lay on the hearth, her voice called the peacocks in the lonely gardens, her scores of Beethoven and Schubert and Berlioz lay open on the grand pianos. Even the look of the great bouquets in the Japanese bowls and the jars of Saxe and Sèvres was different: her hand had added a rose there, a fern here; they were flowers which were there because she loved them, not only because they served for decorations grouped by skilful servants as mere masses of colour. The great house, sombre in its Bourbon stateliness, magnificent in its architecture, but oppressive in its too continual display of wealth, was no longer ‘une maison sans musique, une ruche sans abeilles;’ it had gained a charm which was none the less perceptible because undefinable and impalpable, as the scent of the tea-roses in the tall Sèvres jars. But Friederich Othmar was more sensible of this than was the possessor of the house and of her. Friederich Othmar, who had lived for fifty years and more without perceiving that he had never had, or wished to have, a home, perceived that his nephew had one and scarcely appreciated it. Friederich Othmar himself became suddenly alive to the pleasure of finding something home-like in that corner of her boudoir where she drew a Japanese screen between him and the draught from the windows, brought him his cup of green tea, and listened with an interest fresh and unfeigned to his anecdotes, his reminiscences, and his counsels: but he found Othmar there less often than he would have wished.

‘He will be glad of that coin du feu some day,’ he thought angrily; annoyed by a neglect which Yseulte herself did not perceive. She had been used to solitude; she was neither vain nor exacting; she understood that everything could not be in Paris altogether as it had been at Amyôt; and if she gave a sigh to that necessity, she bravely and tranquilly accepted it. The great world was about her with its demands, its solicitations, its tyrannies over time and thought; she had little leisure for meditation; the Countess Othmar could not escape the social obligations of her position or avoid its ceremonies and its courtesies.

She remained much graver and simpler than her contemporaries were; she cared for none of the noisy amusements of modern fashion; the world of pleasure seemed to her, on the whole, a little vulgar, a little tiresome, astonishingly monotonous, even in its feverish search for the untried and the startling. But at the same time she could not escape from its demands, and their effects upon her, and the counsels of Friederich Othmar incessantly reminded her that she could best serve the honour of the name she bore by making Europe admire and praise her. It was a counsel which contained the seeds of danger; but he read her character aright.

‘Voilà une qui ne cascadera jamais,’ said the Baron to himself in his tongue of the Boulevards. He was infinitely proud of, and delighted with her; he gave her the most magnificent presents, bought her the rarest of jewels. He accompanied her constantly in her drives and to the opera, and even in the visits which she paid.

‘It is Baron Fritz whom Othmar’s marriage has reformed!’ said a pretty woman, who had long considered the silver-haired financier as her own especial prey. He took a paternal pleasure in the admiration which the rare patrician graces of the girl awoke in that tout Paris which he had long considered the lawgiver of the universe.

‘If you had been Marie Antoinette, there might have been no revolution,’ he said jestingly to her. ‘You would never have flirted with Ferson, nor would you have played at shepherdessing, or worn a mask in the Palais Royal.’

‘I think I should only have thought of France,’ she answered.

‘Which would not have prevented you from going to the guillotine, I dare say,’ said the Baron. ‘Nations are the concentrated distillation of the ingratitude of men. There is only one thing which one can always count on with absolute certainty, and that is, the general and individual thanklessness.’

Nothing was further from his thoughts than to cloud over the trust, confidence, and faith of her innocent optimism. He spoke as he thought and felt, and as a long experience of mankind had taught him to do, without reflecting that he dropped the bitterness of gall into a fair and limpid spring, which had seen nothing above its waters save the white lily-cups and the blue heavens.

‘She will be robbed right and left endlessly if she be not taught a little mistrust,’ he said to Othmar himself, who replied:

‘Let her be robbed of everything rather than of her illusions. This is the only loss from which we never recover.’

‘What an absurd idea!’ thought the Baron, who had never cherished any illusions at all, and had found life exceedingly entertaining and enjoyable without them.

The practical mind can no more understand the regrets of the meditative one than a manufacturer, spending his days by choice amidst the roar of steam wheels and the ledgers of a counting-house, can understand the artist’s anguish when he is shut up in a city garret whence he cannot see a sunset or a sunrise.

‘The woes of the body, I grant, may be too much for one’s philosophy,’ the Baron was wont to say. ‘With the gout, or neuralgia, or sciatica, Seneca’s self might fail to retain serenity. But the sorrows of the emotions or of the imagination are so entirely fictitious that anyone, by the exercise of a little self-control, may put them aside completely.’

‘What! Even the losses of death?’ objected some one once.

The Baron smiled:

‘Death cannot affect you very greatly unless you have already committed an act of unwisdom—that is, have already attached yourself to some other life than your own.’

‘Then where is love?’ said his interlocutor.

‘Where it has always been,’ said Friederich Othmar, ‘chiefly in the senses partially in the imagination. When we have both the senses and the imagination under the control of our temperate judgment, it cannot disturb us seriously. In my youth, and even in my maturity,’ he continued, with complacence, ‘I have dallied with love as well as other men, but the moment that I felt that any one passion was likely to exercise undue influence upon me, I withdrew myself from it. To break a chain is difficult, but never to let it be forged is easy.’

He thought it his duty to put his young favourite on her guard against all the deceptions and delusions which the world prepares for its novices; he told her much more than her husband would have done of all the intricacies and meanings of the varied life which was about her, gave her the key to many of its secrets, and the hidden biographies of many of its personages.

‘You are in the world, you must understand the world,’ he said to her; ‘if not, it will be a mere labyrinth to you, and you will be lost in it. You need not become a mondaine with your heart, but you must become one with your head, or the mondaines will devour you. It is not necessary that you should gamble or swear or get into debts for your petticoats, as they do; but it is necessary that you should understand the society of your time. At Amyôt you may be a young saint, as heaven meant you to be, but in Paris you must be able to hold your own against those who are the reverse of saints. Otho ought to teach you all this himself, but he will not, so you must listen to me. I have not been so engrossed in the gold market all my days that I do not know la haute gomme down to the ground. In my leisure I have always gone into the world: the boudoir of a pretty woman is always much more amusing than a card-table or a pistol-gallery. L’Ecole des Femmes is the one to which every wise man goes.’

He paused, with a consciousness that he had better not pursue that theme.

‘My child,’ he resumed, as the carriage rolled down the Bois, ‘you are not seventeen; you are in love with your husband; you sweep your conscience every morning with a palm-leaf to make sure there is no little film of a cobweb left in it; you think life is such a simple and beautiful thing that you have only to get up and go to bed as the sun does. You hear quantities of compliments, but you pay no attention to them; you are altogether as innocent as a flower, and you are quite exquisite like that—it suits you; but, all the same, you cannot go on like that for ever. Men might let you, for we are not as black as we are painted, but women will not. It is from women that your sorrows will come, that your perception of evil will come, that your enemies will come. Satan, pardon me the word, would take off his hat to you and pass by on the other side, for he, too, is not as black as he has been painted. But women will not feel what Satan would feel; they are much more hard to touch. It is women whom you must try to understand; you can analyse without imbibing, as chemists do poisons.’

‘Must one analyse at all?’ said Yseulte, a little wistfully.

Such abrupt and familiar allusions to Satan disturbed the awe in which she had been reared at Faïel; but she was growing used to the perception that all the things which she held most sacred were mere Mother Goose’s tales to the world in general, and to understand why her cousin Clothilde, who had her emblazoned chair at S. Philippe du Roule and occupied it so regularly, and was so heedful all Lent to wear the strictest mourning costume without a shred of lace, had yet not a grain of real religion in her. She began to comprehend what Blanchette had meant by all her rapturous felicitations, and sometimes the proud and austere young soul of her was humiliated to think that these mere material pleasures should have any attraction for her: she felt that her grandmother’s ascetic and haughty teachings would have condemned such joys as mundane and vulgar. But the pleasure of them was there, nevertheless, and she was too honest in her self-analysis to dissimulate before her conscience. Unworldly as temperament and education alike made her, Yseulte was feminine enough and accessible enough to such vanities for all the possessions into which she entered to amuse and please her with their novelty and the sense of power which they gave. She was but a child in years, and the large households deferential to her slightest word, the grand equipages ready for her whim and fancy, the beautiful horses which bore her with the fleetness of the wind, the vast houses through which she could wander, conscious that she was the mistress of them all, the innumerable beauties of art which they contained, the caskets and coffers full of jewels and baubles, all these things beguiled her time and gratified that pride which a very young girl always feels in the sudden assumption of womanhood. She began to understand why all her companions at Faïel had thought her so fortunate. Her serious and spiritual nature made her feel a little ashamed at finding so much interest in such earthly treasures; in her self-examination she reproved herself, and almost contemned herself. But she was too young not to take such irresistible delight in all these things as a child takes in butterflies or poppies; it was delightful to say ‘I wish,’ and see her wishes accomplished as by magic; it was charming to give away right and left, as out of a bottomless purse; it was amusing to command, to confer, to be regarded as the source of all favours and all fortune, as the people of Amyôt and the household of Paris regarded her. In time, the delicacy of her taste, the seriousness of her intelligence, might probably make these possessions and privileges pall on her; in time she would see sycophancy where she now saw only devotion, and grow weary of a loyalty only rooted in self-interest; but, at the onset, life was to her like a fairy story, her empire was one on which the sun never set and in which the spring-time never waned.

Othmar never said one word which could have served to disenchant her. Conscious that he could not give her all the singleness of love which was her due, he strove to atone for any wrong he did her so by multiplying around her every physical gratification, and giving her an unlimited power of self-indulgence.

In this new life she was like a child who stands amidst the bewilderment of its crowd of New Year presents; sometimes she thought of herself as she had been six months before, sitting in the shadow of the stone cloisters at Faïel, in her dust-coloured convent frock, with the blue ribbon of merit crossing her breast and some holy book open on her hands, with a kind of wondering pity and strangeness, and a sense of being herself far, very far, away from any kinship with that sad grey figure.

That so little of egotism was aroused in her in this hot-house existence which she led, was due to the generosity and simplicity of her instincts, on which the contagion of worldly influences had little power. To send a silver crucifix to Faïel, or a piece of fine lace to Nicole, still gave her greater pleasure than to wear her own great diamonds or see the crowds in the Champs Elysées look after her carriage with its liveries of black velvet and white satin.

Meanwhile she had the natural feeling of every unselfish and generous nature, that her life was not full enough of thought for others. It was difficult for her at her age to know what to do, so as to carry out those theories of self-sacrifice which training and temperament alike made a religion to her.

Friederich Othmar, when he discovered this, told her, with some impatience, that the House of Othmar always did what was expected of it in this respect, and that its women had no occasion to trouble their heads with such matters.

‘Wherever we have been located we have always been good citizens,’ he said, with truth. ‘We have always borne our due share of public expenditure or public almsgiving; perhaps more than our due share. Myself, I believe that all that sort of charity is a vast mistake. It is intended as a sop to the wolves, but you cannot feed wolves on sops. They will always want your blood, however they may lick up your mess.’

Yseulte remembered that S. Francis had proved that even wolves may be tamed into affection and usefulness; but though she believed firmly in that legend, she hesitated to put it forward, even as an allegory, as evidence against the arguments of the Baron. She did not lack courage, nor even that truest courage, the courage of opinion, but she had been reared in the old traditions of high breeding, which make contradiction a vulgarity, and, from the young to the old, an offence.

‘I hope you will not make yourself into a sort of Judith Montefiore,’ continued the Baron irritably. ‘We are not Jews. Jews must do that kind of thing to get themselves tolerated. We could forgive them the Crucifixion, but we cannot forgive them their percentage. Though we are not Jews, Otho has already done some Quixotic things in the Montefiore fashion. I hope you will not encourage him to continue them.’

‘Tell me what they were,’ she said, with the light in her eyes and the colour in her face.

‘Not I,’ said the Baron; ‘I much prefer to see him smoking à Londrès at the Jockey.’

‘Had he ever any very great sorrow?’ she ventured to ask.

‘None, my dear, but what he chose to make for himself,’ replied Friederich Othmar, with contempt. ‘Do you remember Joubert’s regret that he could not write his thoughts on the bark of trees by merely looking at them?—well, Otho’s griefs are much as baseless. As if,’ he added, ‘as if there were any real grief in the world,—except the gout!’

‘He is like Obermann, like Amiel,’ she said timidly. She had read passages in the volumes of those dreamy and isolated thinkers in the library of Amyôt. Friederich Othmar shrugged his shoulders; those names signified to him the very lowest deeps of human ineptitude and folly.

‘Men who were so afraid of disappointment and disillusion that they would allow themselves to enjoy nothing! It would be as reasonable to let oneself die of starvation as a preventive of dyspepsia! Such men do not think; they only moon. The cattle that lie and graze under the trees have meditations quite as useful. My child,’ he added, ‘would you be wise or foolish if you threw all your diamonds into the river in anger because they were not stars? That is what your husband does with his life. You must learn to persuade him that the stars are unattainable, and that the diamonds represent a very fair and fruitful kingdom if not the powers of the air.’

Yseulte sighed wistfully. She vaguely felt that it was not within her means to reconcile him with the world and fate; she had not the magic wand.

‘I am always in dread,’ continued the Baron, ‘that you, with your religious ideas, and he, with his impatience of his position, will do something extraordinary and Quixotic; will turn S. Pharamond into a maison de santé, or this hotel into a lazar-house for cancer. I shall never be surprised at any madness of that sort.’

Yseulte sighed a little.

‘But, there is the misery of the world all around us,’ she ventured to say; ‘if we could alleviate it, would it not be worth any sacrifice?’

‘My dear,’ said Baron Fritz, ‘when Napoléon gave the opium at Jaffa, he did more to alleviate suffering than all the philanthropists have ever done. Yet it has been always brought against him as his worst action. I went once, out of curiosity, to see the Incurables at the hospital of la Salpêtrière. Well, if false sentiment did not prevent the treatment à la Jaffa taking place there, an infinitude of hideous suffering and of hideous deformity would be mercifully nded. But the world is so sentimental that it will send several hundred thousand of young and healthy men to endure all kinds of tortures in war for a question of frontier, or a matter of national etiquette, but it esteems it unlawful to kill idiots or drug to death incurables cursed with elephantiasis or leprosy.’

Yseulte’s clear eyes grew troubled; these views of life were perplexing to her. At Faïel all such contradictions had been simply accepted as ordained under one unquestioned and divine law; the conversation of Friederich Othmar depressed and bewildered her, but she could perceive its reason. It made her reflect; it made her more of a woman, less of a child. He thought that was for the best. If she were not educated in some worldly knowledge, the world would make an easy prey of her.

‘Otho treats her as if she were an ivory madonnina who would remain aloof on an altar all her days,’ he said to a woman he knew. ‘On the contrary, she is a beautiful creature, about whom all the world will buzz and sting like bees about a lily. She must be taught not to throw away her honey. She is just now in the clouds; she is very much in love with a man who is not in love with her; she is full of ideals and impossible sentiments. She is half a child, half an angel; but to hold her own in the world she must be something else—not so angelic and not so childish,—and she must learn to esteem people at their value, which is for the most part very small. It would be even well if she could see Otho as he is; she would take life more easily. She would not be so likely to fall headlong from a heaven of adoration into a stone well of disillusion. Truths live at the bottom of these wells, no doubt, but they are not agreeable, and they give a shock to sensitive people. A woman is prettier when she is sensitive. It is like piety or charity—it is an essentially feminine ornament, but it is not a quality which wears well.’

His friend laughed.

‘Do you think Othmar will thank you for so educating his wife?’

‘He has never thanked me for anything that I have done,’ he replied. ‘But that does not prevent me from doing what I consider is my duty, or is most wise.’

‘Say wisdom,’ returned the lady. ‘That suits you better than duty. Duty is ridiculous if you do not let le bon Dieu pose behind it.’

‘I know people say so,’ answered the Baron; ‘but it is only an idea. In practical life agnostics and disbelievers of every sort make just as good citizens as the pietists.’

With the second week of December there was a great social event in Paris. The Hôtel Othmar was opened to the world. ‘The gates of Janus unclose,’ said one who deemed himself a wit in allusion to a war, then in embryo, into whose conception and gestation the gold of the Othmar was considered to enter largely.

The Boulevard S. Germain and all its approaches were like rivers of light, and the sound of carriage wheels was like the roll of artillery. ‘Tout Paris’ flocked there, and even the Faubourg disdained not to pass through those immense gates of gilded bronze, which were nicknamed of Janus, since the mistress of the salons within was by birth incontestibly a Comtesse de Valogne.

‘Tiens, tiens, tiens!’ murmured Aurore de Vannes. ‘Is it possible for twelve months to have so changed a fillette into a goddess! Really, we were all wrong, and Othmar was right. We all thought her a pauvrette, to be put away in a holy house; he had the sense to see that she would become superb, and would set him right with all the Faubourg. The Faubourg was always well inclined to him, because his grandmother was a de Soissons-Valette, but his marriage has made him one of them: he is definitely placed for ever. Really, I never gave him credit for so much foresight when he sent that ivory casket. I thought it was only a caprice.’

‘Othmar cares not a straw for the Faubourg,’ said her husband, out of the pure spirit of contradiction. ‘He will never give his millions to carry on a Holy War or restore the throne. He is more likely to dream of a great Western empire with its capital at the Golden Horn. He is a Slavophile.’

‘He is wholly indifferent to politics; it is Baron Fritz who is the political conspirator,’ returned the Duchesse. ‘Otho is a mere dreamer, and he used to be a discontented one. Perhaps he is not so now.’

‘He does not look especially happy; she does. I confess I should be sorry for him to become contented; the contemplation of his discontent has always reconciled me with having nothing myself,’ said a great diplomatist, whose debts were as considerable as his talents.

‘If he be not contented——’ began the Duc, and paused, conscious that for him to say anything except a jest of any marriage under the sun would appear supremely ridiculous to his companions. Yet his admiration for Yseulte was not dormant, and took a still warmer character as he saw her in the grande tenue of a woman of the world, with the Othmar diamonds, long famous and long unseen, on her fair hair and her white breast.

‘She has too many jewels for such a child,’ he said irritably. ‘She is covered with them like an Indian idol. That is so like a financier’s love of display!’

‘I dare say he has given them to her as you give toys to a child,’ replied the diplomatist. ‘Othmar has no faults of display. What has been almost ridiculous in him has been a simplicity of taste not in accord with his millions. But his wife is so very handsome that she may well betray him into some vanities.’

Twelve months had truly made in her that almost magical transformation which passion can cause in a very young and innocent girl who, from entire seclusion and absolute ignorance, is suddenly thrown into the arms of a man whom she has scarcely seen, yet timidly adores. She had lost her extreme spirituality of expression, but she had gained a thousand-fold in other ways. Her form had developed, her whole person had become that of a woman instead of a child; she was many years older than she had been one short year before, when, in her little quiet chamber under the woods of Faïel, she had only thought of love as a mystical religious emotion, and of herself as the betrothed of Christ.

She filled her place, and did the honours of her house with a calm grace which had nothing of the hesitation or the awkwardness of youth. He had told her what to do, and she did it with perfect ease, and that dignity which had so become her when she had curtsied to Melville as a little child in the old, dusky house in the Ile Saint-Louis. In manner she might have been a Queen of France for five-and-twenty years. It was only in the unworn transparency of the fair skin, beneath which the blood came and went so warmly, the slenderness of the lines of her form, the childlike naïveté of her smile, that her exceeding youthfulness was still revealed.

She made no single error; she said little, but she said always what was needful and becoming; she received each one of her guests with the phrase that pleased them, with the observances that were due to them; there was no hesitation or awkwardness in her. Even women who watched her, as her cousin did, with a malicious wish to find her at fault somewhere, were forced to confess to themselves that she bore herself admirably. If she had a defect, it was that she appeared a little cold. She was always exquisitely courteous; she was never familiar.

‘She has the manner of the last century,’ said Madame de Vannes, ‘of the last century, before the women of Marie Antoinette rode donkeys and milked cows.’

To see that baby who six months ago had never spoken to any man except her confessor, and never worn any ornament except her convent medal, receiving sovereigns and princes and ambassadors, de puissance à puissance, and wearing diamonds which were ten times bigger, finer, and in greater profusion than her own, made her very angry, and yet made her laugh. She had seen many transformations of fillettes into great ladies, but none quite so rapid, so striking, or so complete as that of her young cousin into the mistress of the Hôtel Othmar.

‘I wish Nadine Napraxine were here this evening,’ she thought with that good-humoured malice which enjoys a friend’s annoyance without meaning any real unkindness.

‘All Paris will talk of your ball and much more of you to-morrow,’ said de Vannes during the evening to his wife’s cousin. ‘Does that please you as much as it pleases most of them?’

‘I shall not think about it,’ replied Yseulte, simply.

‘But I imagine you read the journals?’

‘No, never.’

‘Never!’ he echoed, incredulously. ‘Why is that?’

She hesitated, then answered with a little blush: ‘He has told me not; he thinks they are foolish.’

‘Othmar?’ asked the Duc, with a laugh. ‘Do you obey him as you did the Mother Superior?’

‘Why not?’ said Yseulte gently, but coldly.

‘Why not!’ he said irritably. ‘Well, because you should begin as you wish to go on; you will not care for that state of servitude long; it would be better never to accustom him to it.’

‘Excuse me, my cousin, I see Madame de Tavernes is looking for me,’ said Yseulte, as she went to speak with a Duchesse whose genealogical tree mounted to the remote ages before the long-haired kings; a stately and powdered person who had issued from the retirement in which she usually lived to honour the first great entertainment of the daughter of Gui de Valogne.

The Duc was rebuffed and annoyed.

‘She has learned her riposte already,’ he thought, ‘and she has not forgotten the locket. I wonder if he care? If he want to be free himself, he had better put her on a course of petits journaux at once. There is no recipe like that for corrupting the mind and debasing the taste. How handsome she is! What a lovely face—what a lovely form!—and only seventeen even now! She will be in perfect beauty for the next ten years. If he be not a very ardent or a very assiduous husband, he will not be able to keep all that to himself; he will have many rivals, and he will be sure to be unfaithful himself:—then she will read the journals and learn how women console themselves.’

At five o’clock that morning her rooms were empty, her guests were gone, and her woman had undressed her, and put on her a négligée of white silk; her hair was unloosened and fell behind her like a cascade of gold; all the great jewels were strewn on the table near; she was looking at her own reflection in the large oval silver-framed mirror before her; she smiled a little as she did so; her eyes were luminous, her cheeks were flushed; she was sensible of no fatigue, she was only elated with her own triumphs. She had had a girlish pleasure in receiving her cousins in that magnificent house; she had had an innocent triumph in showing how well she could fill the part of a woman of the world; she felt like a child who has played a queen’s part in some pageant, and played it well; something of the insidious charm of the world had begun to steal on her; something of its vanity and of its rivalry had begun to attract her;—very little, for her nature was too proud, too pure, and too serious to yield easily to these temptations, but something nevertheless. Only as yet her one dominant thought was of him in it all. Had he also been content; had there been nothing that he could have desired otherwise?

She turned with a smile, half timid still, as he knocked at the door and entered her chamber. Her attendants withdrew at a sign from him; he took her in his arms and kissed her.

‘I thank you for all your triumphs, dear,’ he said kindly. ‘They are mine.’

‘Did I really do well?’ she said doubtfully, but joyfully.

‘Perfectly, perhaps almost too well; Paris will talk too much of you.’

‘I forgot nothing?’ she asked, still anxiously.

‘You forgot nothing, and you looked—much too beautiful for men quickly to forgive me! No, dear, I do not flatter you; flattery would be absurd from me to you; I tell you the simple truth.’

‘I am glad,’ she said simply, ‘for I have nothing else to reward you with for all you have given to me.’

She spoke shyly, for she was always in awe of him a little. Her arm, uncovered to the shoulder as the loose folds of the sleeve fell away from it, stole timidly about his throat; in all her caresses there was the hesitation of a proud and delicate nature blent with the longing of an ardent love. Habit had not familiarised her with the relation in which he stood to her; the brutalising intimacy of marriage had not dwarfed or dulled her ideal and adoration of him. He was still much less her lover than her lord.

Othmar took the bright gold of her heavy hair in his hand, and drew it through his fingers.

‘On chasse de race,’ he said, with a smile. ‘You receive a great crowd as if you had been reared in a court from your babyhood.’

‘You told me what to do,’ she answered simply. ‘It seems very easy; besides, every one was so extremely kind.’

‘The kindness of society,’ thought Othmar, ‘the kiss of Judas!’

But he did not say so. Let her learn for herself what it was worth, he thought; the knowledge would come soon enough of itself.

Yseulte’s face grew grave as she sat lost in thought.

‘I do not think it is right to care for this sort of thing,’ she said, with hesitation. ‘It is only a sort of vanity. And then all these diamonds and these great pearls—they say they are worth millions—I do not like to wear them whilst there are so many without clothes or food of any kind; one knows that there is so much misery all about us here in Paris. Is it right, do you think, to enjoy oneself in this kind of way? I seem to remember nothing but myself all the day long——’

Othmar smiled and sighed.

‘Enjoy, my child, while you can; leave all those grave thoughts for your older years. If you like to sell your jewels, and give them all to the poor, you can do it, but wait a few years first; wait to see more of the world. There is a cruel science, called political economy, which they certainly did not teach you at Faïel; you must learn something of that before you try to decide these questions, which have vainly perplexed every thoughtful man since rich and poor were together on earth. And now, shut your pretty eyes, and sleep and dream of your triumphs; they have been very innocent ones, you need not repent them.’

He kissed her again, and left her to her daybreak slumber in the warm orange-flower-scented air of her bed-chamber; and himself went out into the chill half-frozen streets of Paris on one of those errands of mercy of which he never spoke to any human being, and which were the result of his pity for men rather than of any belief or faith or sympathy that he had with them. He was one of the few men whom the lawless classes of Paris have ever respected.

Othmar himself could go unharmed where the police would not have ventured to go save in force; and in the days of the Commune the worst leaders of it had put a white cross on the great houses of which he was master, and spared them from torch and shell for sake of the young man who was wont to pass through the vilest quarters of Paris, with his hand ever open and his compassion never denied. They knew that if their couches sociales could have been an accomplished fact, Othmar himself would never have wished the old state of things maintained, but would have accepted the new with indifference and perfect courage, himself glad to be rid of a burden.

They forgave him his riches for sake of his own contempt for them; his courage, even his coldness, attracted them. He had no blague; he was entirely sincere; he never attempted to convert them to anything; he aided them without putting any price on his aid, either of gratitude or doctrine. They knew that he had neither fear of them nor love for them, but that he had a profound sense of a common humanity with them, which was in his eyes as in theirs another name for a common misfortune.

The times were out of joint for him. If he had been created with the capacity of religious faith, he would have been willingly what François Xavier or Père Lacordaire were. But he had the clear and critical intelligence of a man of the world; the fables of faith could not give him any mental pabulum. He took refuge in pity; it seemed to him that men were bound to do for one another at least as much as buffaloes do, which in trouble gather around the wounded ones of the herd.

Melville alone had found out something of what he did; Melville, who although the sweetest-voiced, softest-handed, of churchmen and courtiers in salon and boudoir, never feared or failed to descend into the haunts of iniquity, to grapple with disease and crime. In such places he and Othmar had met by chance more than once, and on one occasion Melville had said to him: ‘You have more influence than I, because they do not suspect you; a priest is always suspected of trying to save souls only to serve his own.’

‘If I have more influence than you, they are thankless,’ rejoined Othmar; ‘for you certainly love them, and I care nothing for them, absolutely nothing.’

‘Why do you serve them, then?’ asked Melville, in surprise.

Othmar sighed impatiently. ‘It seems to me that one is bound in honour when fate has placed oneself beyond temptation;—besides, these reeking breeding-pens of crime in the midst of our own luxury are horrible; they are cancers in the very womb of human nature. Your Christianity has endeavoured to cure them for eighteen centuries, and has always failed miserably. The cancer grows and grows.’

Few persons save those of the police, who were perforce acquainted with his movements, were aware of the intimacy and influence he had acquired with the most wretched and the most dangerous classes of Paris; the food of maisons centrales and the emigrants of Nouméa. Often Friederich Othmar wondered within himself whither went the large sums which his nephew drew and spent without explanation; what he spent on art and on pleasure was known, but there were often great quantities of money taken by Othmar, in the exercise of his unquestionable right, for the use of which all the Baron’s ingenuity failed to find an account. Numberless families redeemed from misery, many youths saved from crime and the galleys, many grown men aided to begin new lives in other climes, and many a foul place purged to moral and physical cleanliness, swallowed up these millions of francs, of which the employment remained a secret to the argus-eyes of Baron Fritz. There was a nobility about the indifference of this very rich man to his riches which conquered the hatred of the poor even amongst the Socialistic arrondissements, where such hatred was the sole religion recognised. They knew that Othmar himself was as disdainful of existent society as they were themselves, and that although fortune had so favoured him, he was no more content with the arrangement of the world than they were themselves. They were continually, brutally, ungrateful, but underneath their gratitude they liked him, and would never have harmed him.

As he walked out now into the misty air of dawn, he recalled the lovely face, with its sleepy eyelids, of his young wife with a sharp pang of conscience. Why could he not be content with that innocent and undivided love?

He recalled with a sense of some great fault in himself how entirely she was outside his life, how little hold she had upon his passions or his emotions. She was exquisite, she was purity itself in body and soul; he realised his own absolute possession of her as he had never done that of any other woman. He had been, that night, proud of her grace before the world, charmed by her manner, conscious of her incomparable distinction; and she was his as entirely as any flower that he might gather in a field. For him had been her first flush, her first kiss, her first consciousness of love; and yet, as he walked through the streets of Paris, leaving her to sink to sleep like a happy and tired child, he was conscious that his heart was indifferent to her; that, the mere early inclinations of the senses pacified, she had no power to rouse in him more than the kindly and indulgent affection which a child might have called forth by its helplessness and beauty.

He desired earnestly to make her as happy as any creature could be on earth, and would have denied her nothing which could have helped to make her so; but he could not command his own passions, and he could not make her the supreme mistress of them. She was a most lovely and most innocent creature, who was welcome to enjoy all the greatness and the grace of life with which he could dower her; she was a young saint who would bear his children in her breast as innocently as the peach-blossom bears the fruit; she was at all times both dear to him and sacred to him; but love for her was not there. He sighed impatiently as he felt that in all his words and his caresses he acted a part with her, that perhaps sooner or later, when the world had taught her better what men were, she would know that, and would be no longer so easily deceived.

As he had watched her that evening in her serenity, her gracefulness, her dignity, he had all at once remembered that in the great world youth grows rapidly, as a flower in a hothouse, that she would be surrounded by many who would ask no happier task than to enlighten her ignorance and embitter her confidence, and that if she ever came to learn and realise that she had owed her marriage partially to his compassion, and more still to his passion for another woman, her heart might break under the burden of that bitter knowledge, but her pride would never pardon the offence.

He began to feel as if he wronged her, though neither by act nor word had he been untrue to her since her marriage. She was so charming in every way, so delicate of thought, so graceful in expression, so intelligent even in her ignorance, so wholly worthy to inspire and retain the greatest love of a man’s life, that he felt guilty before her, knowing that his pulses beat no quicker when he joined her after absence, that when her young lips, fresh as roses, touched his own, he met them without ardour or emotion. He had wished society to attract her; it seemed to him the quickest and the easiest compensation that he could offer her. At the root of the willingness with which he entertained the world, he to whom it was as indifferent as it was commonplace, was the unacknowledged sentiment that if Yseulte placed her happiness, as her temperament would lead her to do, in the inner life, in the affections and in the sympathies, she would be inevitably most miserable soon or late, since soon or late she would discover the poverty of his own heart; and his heart was richly endowed enough by nature to make him ashamed to think that it might ever be so. Friederich Othmar judged him harshly but justly; his indulgence and tenderness to her were not those of a lover, but were the accumulated gifts with which he strove to make her blind to his own coldness. The more he lived with her, the more he felt as though it were an unpardonable sin to have no love to give her, and the farther the possibility of such love receded from him. Esteem, admiration, tenderness, even affection, may all exist only to make the absence of love itself the more conspicuous.

As he went through the quiet streets, almost wholly deserted in the early hour of the morning, and swept by a keen wind, a waggon thundering along at too rapid a pace for so clumsy a vehicle caught the wheel of a carriage, which was coming in the opposite direction. The shock flung the carriage on the kerbstone; one of its two horses fell, the other struggled like a demoniac; the coachman and servant were thrown to the ground. Othmar naturally hastened to the spot. He was the only person in sight. The carriage itself had oscillated violently, but was not upset; its occupant had opened the door of it before he could arrive at the spot, and had leaped lightly out, though wrapped in sable furs from head to foot. When he reached the place, the fur-clad figure was standing in calm contemplation of the harm which had been done, and of the struggling horses which the coachman, who had sprung to his feet, was endeavouring to pacify.

‘Othmar, is it you?’ said a voice whose clear and sweet vibration sent the blood to his temples; and the eyes of Nadine Napraxine looked at him from under the sable lining of her velvet hood.

The waggon had blundered on out of sight, its driver in terror of the distant figure of a sergeant-de-ville who had now approached the scene. The fallen men had both found their feet, and the horses were still throwing themselves from side to side with broken traces and slippery pavement adding to the difficulty increased by their terror.

Othmar’s own coupé, which followed him at a distance, had now come up, and his servants assisted hers. He opened the door of his own carriage.

‘Pray accept it,’ he said hurriedly. ‘They will drive you where you wish; I will stay and help your people.’

‘My people are idiots,’ she said, as she gave them a disdainful glance. ‘The waggon was large enough to be seen. I was coming from the Gare du Nord; my women and the fourgons are behind me. What are you about at this hour? Does the Countess Othmar allow you to be out so early—or so late?’

There was a grain of malice in the accent of the words; Othmar coloured despite himself, yet knew not why. He felt his whole being thrill at the mere sound of the sweet, cruel, well-remembered tones, and hated her.

She looked at him as they stood together on the kerbstone of the deserted and foggy street. She was enveloped in her long fur mantle, and none of the lines of her figure were traceable: she had no more contour than an Esquimaux. Yet, nevertheless, that incomparable grace which belonged to her—as its movement to a bird, as its fragrance to a flower—seemed to detach itself, and escape, even from the heavy shapeless covering of the travelling-cloak in which she had been wrapped throughout her long express journey from Russia hither by way of Berlin and Strasburg. There was nothing visible of her except her starry eyes, and yet all the irresistible power which she possessed made his pulses fast and his thought confused; he strove against his own weakness, and pressed his offer on her with a cold courtesy.

‘Well, I will take it since you wish it,’ she said, as she entered his coupé. ‘You will say who I am to this sergeant-de-ville, and whatever else may be necessary, though it is no case for the police since the waggoner has made good his escape; and if he had not, I certainly should let him alone. Tell your men my address—you remember it? Au revoir! I shall come and witness your happiness. Many things from me to your wife.’

They were only the usual words of commonplace politeness, yet to the ear of Othmar they were fraught with a thousand meanings. ‘C’est le ton qui fait la musique,’ and the tone of these perfectly simple sentences had for him irony, mockery, menace, and ridicule. Remember her address! Remember the Hôtel Napraxine! As if to his dying day he would ever forget the slightest trifle which had ever been associated with her!

His horses started off at a swift trot, and he lost her from sight. The questions of the police as to the cause of the accident started him as though someone had spoken to him in his sleep. When the matter was over, and the disabled carriage had been dragged away by hand, and the frightened horses led homewards by their coachman, it was too late to go where he had intended. He returned to his own house, bathed, dressed, and went to his library; but he could not give his attention to what he read. Nor when, with the early hours of the forenoon, various persons came to see him by appointment, could he confine his thoughts to the subjects under consideration.

At noon he gave his card to a servant, and told the man to go and inquire at her hotel if the Princess Napraxine had suffered any inconvenience from the accident of that morning.

The servant brought him back one of the small pale-rose-tinted notes, folded in three, with the crown embossed in silver, which he knew so well. The few lines in it said only:

‘Merci bien. Vous êtes toujours preux chevalier. Je n’ai rien souffert du tout. Le Prince vous remerciera.—N. N.’

It was the merest trifle, a thing of no import, such as she wrote by scores every week to numbers of indifferent people; yet it had a sort of fascination for him. He could not destroy it; its faint subtle scent, like that of a tea-rose, recalled so vividly the charm of the woman who had written it; it seemed to him as if no one but Nadine Napraxine could have sent that little note, coloured like a sea-shell, delicate as a butterfly, with its miniature and mignonne writing. Ashamed of his own weakness, and angry with himself for his own concessions, he threw it into a drawer of his bureau and turned the key on it.

He had not seen her for a year, and her spell was unbroken; all he had done to escape from it was of no avail. One glance of her eyes from beneath the furs in that bleak, grey, misty daybreak, had sufficed to re-establish her dominion. He was conscious that life seemed no more the same to him since that chance encounter; it would be more troubled, more excited, more disturbed, but it would not be again the dull and even course which it had seemed to be when he had entered absent from her.

‘I will never see her, except in a crowd,’ he said to himself, whilst he remembered, with self-reproach, the tender caresses of Yseulte, which left him so calm, and even in his heart so cold!

Of course he had known that the Princess Napraxine, who was more Parisienne than the Parisiennes, would, sooner or later, return to her home there; would sooner or later reappear in the society which she had always preferred to all other. Russia had never held her long, and the seclusion which both her taste and her irritation had made her seek after the suicide of Seliedoff could not, in the nature of things, have lasted longer than one season. Yet the sense that she was there within a few streets of him, separated only by a few roods of house-roof from him, affected him with a force altogether unforeseen. He realised in it that there is no cure in simples for strong fevers, and that the will of a man is as naught against the dominion of passion. Even that slight letter, with its odour as of pale rose-buds, had a power over him which all the loveliness and innocence of Yseulte could not exercise. The irresistible force of his own emotions humiliated him in his own eyes.

He shrank a little, with almost a sense of guiltiness, as a little tap came on the panels of the library door, and from behind the tapestry the fair head of his young wife peeped cautiously.

‘May I come in?’ she asked, as a child might have done.

He rose with instinctive courtesy and opened the door to her.

It was noonday, and her few hours of sleep had sufficed to banish all her fatigue, and to make her as fresh, as radiant, and as clear-eyed, as she had been in the summer woods of Amyôt. She had none of the languor which late hours cause in later years; she had slept as soundly as a young fawn tired with its play, and had awakened as refreshed as a flower that uncloses at sunrise. She wore a long loose gown of palest blue, opening a little at the throat, with much old lace, of which the yellow tinge made whiter still the whiteness of her skin. The gown was of satin, and had gleams and shadows in it as she moved. Her eyes smiled; her cheeks were flushed from her bath; her entrance had a childish eagerness.

‘Do tell me again that I did well last night,’ she said, with a child’s longing for the recapitulation of its innocent triumphs.

He did not look at her as he drew her to him with a mechanical caress.

‘You did perfectly,’ he answered, absently. ‘A great ball is a woman’s Austerlitz, I suppose. Do not let it make you in love with the world.’

‘One cannot but like it,’ she said, with her habitual truthfulness, a little wistfully. ‘That is what I thought last night; perhaps it is wrong—when so many suffer——’

‘They would not suffer a whit less if you did not give a ball.’

She hesitated, being still shy with him, and afraid of that which she had never seen, but which she always dreaded, his displeasure.

‘But,’ she said timidly, ‘when one is so very happy, one wants to do something to deserve it. You have made for me such a perfect life, I want to give others something out of it. I should like to be useful, to show that I am grateful; not only to give away money——’

She paused, colouring a little at her own temerity. She did not express herself very well, because she was so much in earnest, and so uncertain as to whether it would seem discontented or vain in her to say so much. In an earlier moment the words would have touched his heart; he would have probably replied by admitting her into some association with the efforts of his own life, and some knowledge of his own desires and regrets for humanity at large. But in that instant he was only anxious to be alone. He answered a little absently:

‘My child, ask your confessor these questions; he will show you many ways; you think him a good man—I have too many doubts myself to be able to solve yours.’

He spoke with a certain impatience; the harsher note grated on her sensitive ear. She felt that her scruples, which were very honest and sincere, did not meet with the same sympathy from him that they had received a few hours earlier.

A shadow passed over her face and she was silent.

‘My dear,’ continued Othmar, a little penitently, a little inconsistently, ‘I have had such doubts as yours all my life, but no one has ever respected me for them; not even those in whose interest they tormented me. We cannot be wiser than all the world. If we stripped ourselves bare to found some community or some universal asylum, we should only be ridiculed as visionaries or as mischievous disturbers of the public peace and of the balance of fortune. Charity has oftener created a proletariat than it has increased prosperity. These questions have haunted me all my life. When I have found an answer to them, I will tell you. Until then, enjoy yourself. You are at the age when enjoyment is most possible and most natural. I wish your days to be happy.’

He spoke with a certain distraction; he was thinking little of what he said, much of the eyes which had looked at him from under the gloom of the fur in the mists of the dawn. He sighed unconsciously as he felt that this innocent young life beside him was no more to him—hardly more—than the flower which she wore at her throat. He recognised all its beauty, spiritual and physical, but only as he might have done that of a picture he looked at, of a poem he read.

‘Enjoy yourself, dear; why not?’ he added with kindness. ‘You were made to smile as a primrose is made to blossom, and it is now mid-April with you.’

He kissed her, and passed his hand carelessly over her hair, then he glanced at the clock on his writing-table.

‘I must leave you, for I have an appointment to keep. What are you going to do with your day?’

‘Blanchette is to come to me. I have not seen her yet. The children are only now up from Bois le Roy, and Toinon is ill.’

She answered him with a little sigh. She wanted him to understand, and she could not better explain, how her own intense thankfulness for the new joys of her life filled her sensitive conscience with a trembling longing to become more worthy of it all, and to let the light which was about her stream into all dark places, and illumine them with love and peace. But she felt chilled, and discouraged, and silenced; and she had been so accustomed to keep all rebellious thoughts mute, that she did not dream of pursuing a theme to which he appeared indifferent. He kissed her hand and left her. She sank down for a moment on the writing-chair he had occupied before the table, and leaned her forehead on her hands with the first vague sensation of loneliness which had ever touched her since her marriage day.

‘If my little child had been born alive,’ she thought, ‘then I should always have known what duty to do, what use to be——’

It was an infinite trouble to her conscience that in these great palaces of the Othmars she was as useless in her own sight as any one of the green palm trees or the rose-hued parrots in the conservatories. She could give money away, indeed,—almost endlessly; but that did not seem enough to do; that counted to her as nothing, for it cost no effort. It hurt her to feel, as she did feel vaguely, that she was no more the companion of her husband than the marble statue of Athene which stood at one end of his great library. He was infinitely indulgent to her. He was perfectly courteous and kind, and generous even to excess; but he never opened his heart to her, he never made her those familiar confidences which are the sweetest homage that a man can render to a woman, even when they display his own weakness or unwisdom. She had too little experience to be able to measure all that this meant, all of which it argued the absence; but as much perception as she had of it mortified her. At Amyôt she had vaguely suffered from it, but here, in Paris, he seemed very far away from her in thought and feeling. She felt that she was but one of the ornaments of his house, as the azaleas and palms were in their great porcelain vases.

To be exquisitely dressed, to be the possessor of some of the finest jewels in the world, to be told to amuse herself as she chose, to have the world at her feet, and all Paris look after her as she drove over its asphalte, would have been enough to most women of her age to make up perfect happiness; but it was not enough for the girl whose thoughtful years had been passed under the sad and solemn skies of Morbihan, and who had the sense of duty and the instincts of honour inherited from great races who had perished on the scaffold and on the battle-field. There was a pensive seriousness in her nature which would not permit her to abandon herself wholly to the self-indulgences and gaieties of the life of the world. She was too grave and too spiritual to become one of the butterflies who flirt with folly from noonday till night. Her chastened childhood in the darkened rooms on the Ile St. Louis had left a gravity with her which could not easily assimilate itself to the levity and the licence of modern society, which offended her taste as it affronted her delicacy.

CHAPTER XXXV.

A few minutes after Othmar had left the house her groom of the chambers ushered into the library the Duc de Vannes and his elder daughter. Blanchette, muffled up to her dancing turquoise-coloured eyes in sealskin, and with her small, impatient feet cased in little velvet boots lined with fur, in which costume Carlos Durand was about to paint her portrait for the salon, with a background of snow and frosted boughs taken from the Bois, sprang across the long room with the speed of a little greyhound, and embraced her cousin as if she had never loved anyone so much in all the days of her life. They had not met for six months, for Blanchette had been in penitence with her governesses and the dowager Duchesse de Vannes, in the depths of the Jura; a chastisement which had only sent her back to Paris two centimètres taller, full of resolution to avenge herself, and more open-eyed and quick-eared than ever.

‘Ah, my dearest! How happy I am to see you again!’ she cried in ecstasy, lifting her pretty little pale face to be kissed, in a transport of affection.

‘Il faut la ménager: elle est si riche!’ she had said to Toinon that morning, who was in bed with a cold, and who had grumbled in answer, ‘Autrefois elle était si bête!’ to which Blanchette had judiciously replied, ‘On n’est jamais bête quand on est riche.’

De Vannes, when his little daughter’s ecstasies were somewhat spent, approached with a smile and kissed the hand of Yseulte with a reverential but cousinly familiarity.

‘Out so early!’ she said in surprise. ‘Surely you never used to see the outer air till two o’clock?’

‘I brought this feu-follet to enjoy your kindness,’ said the Duc, ‘that I might have the pleasure of seeing you before all the world does. I wished, too, to be the first to congratulate you, my cousin, on your brilliant success last night. You were perfect, marvellous, incredible!——’

‘I think I was much like any one else,’ said Yseulte, to check the torrent of his adjectives; ‘and the success of the ball was due more to Julien than to us; he was so enchanted to have a ball to organise in this great house after so many years without any receptions.’

‘Julien is an admirable maître d’hôtel, no doubt,’ answered de Vannes, with a smile; ‘and he is happy in possessing a young mistress who appreciates his zeal and fidelity, but it is not of Julien that all Paris is talking and sighing this morning.’

‘They must be talking and sighing in their beds then,’ said Yseulte, a little impatiently. ‘I thought no one was up so early as this except myself. Is the Duchesse well? She was so kind last night; she gave so much entrain——’

‘You know I never see her till dinner, if then, unless I chance to cross her in the Bois,’ answered the Duc, a little irritably.

He had risen three hours too early, and had bored himself to bring his little daughter here in his coupé; and he felt that so much self-sacrifice was not likely to avail him anything except that as he looked at Yseulte he could see for once in his life a woman who was still prettier in the morning than at night. He himself did not bear that trying light well; the lines about his eyes were deep and not to be hidden by any art, his eyes were dull and heavy, his cheeks hollow, and his moustache dyed. By night he was still one of the most elegant of la haute gomme, and his natural distinction could never altogether leave him; but his manner of life had aged him prematurely, and he felt old beside the freshness and the youth of Yseulte.

His vanity and his good sense alike counselled him to retire from a position which would avail him nothing; but a certain malice, which was a part of his character, and which his little daughter had inherited in increased degree, prompted him first to take reprisal for the indifference of his reception. Yseulte remained standing, holding the hand of Blanchette, evidently not desiring that he should be long there, and giving him no invitation to protract his visit until her breakfast hour. Blanchette’s mischievous eyes watched her father’s visible annoyance with keen appreciation of it; she had not forgotten the medallion given at Millo, and she had guessed very well why she had received the extraordinary honour of a seat in his brougham as he drove to the Jockey. She had been just about to leave the house with her maid when the Duc, passing her in the vestibule, had said carelessly: ‘Is it you, you little cat? Ah, you are going to your cousin. Well, jump in with me, and I will set you down as I pass; I am going to the Jockey.’ Now Blanchette knew as well as he did that the way from their house to the Jockey Club did not by any means lie past the Hôtel d’Othmar; but she had been too shrewd to say that, and too proud of driving beside her father, who smoked a big cheroot, and told her about the little theatres.

‘Can I see Othmar?’ he asked now, as he made his adieux to Yseulte.

‘I am sorry, but he is just gone out,’ she answered; ‘I think he is gone for some hours; I do not know where.’

‘You will soon learn not to say so,’ thought the Duc, diverted even in his discomfiture by her simplicity. He said aloud:

‘Do you think he may have gone to see the Napraxines? He was always a great friend of theirs, and they arrived last night; it is in all the papers, but then you do not read the papers. I only ask, because I should be so glad if I could meet him anywhere. The Prefect of Nice writes to me about the basin of Millo; now S. Pharamond has much more sea-front and much larger share of the harbour than we have, and if Othmar would use his influence, one word from him——’

‘I will tell him; he will be sure to come to you or write to you,’ she said quickly. She had flinched a little at the name of the Napraxine, which no one had spoken to her since that silver statue of the Love with the empty gourd had been sent to her before her marriage.

‘Bien joué, petit papa,’ thought Blanchette, with understanding and appreciation, as her father bowed himself out of Othmar’s library.

‘Oh, how happy you are!—how I wish I were you!’ she cried, five minutes later, as she skipped about her cousin’s boudoir, while the glow of the fire of olive-wood shone on the panels which Bougereau had painted there with groups of those charming nude children which he can set frolicking with almost the soft poetic grace of Correggio.

Yseulte smiled on the little impudent face of the child, who leaned her elbows on her knees as she spoke.

‘I am very happy,’ she said, with perfect truth. ‘But I hope you will be as much so one day, Blanchette.’

Blanchette nodded.

‘I shall marry into the finance too; the noblesse is finished; papa says so. He said yesterday, “Nous sommes de vieux bonzes—emballons-nous!”’

Blanchette tied her arms and legs in a knot as she had seen a clown do, and made a pantomimic show of being rolled away on a wheelbarrow; then she gathered herself up and came and stood before her cousin and hostess.

‘Te voilà, grande dame!’ she cried, looking at her with her own little pert flaxen head, with its innumerable little curls held on one side critically, as she surveyed Yseulte from head to foot with a frank astonishment and admiration. It was only such a little while ago that Yseulte had been her butt and victim at Millo; that she had ridiculed her for her grey convent dress, her thick shoes, her primitive, pious habits, brought from the Breton woods, and lo!—here she stood, ‘très grande dame!’ as Blanchette, a severe judge in such matters, acknowledged to herself. So tall, so elegant, so stately, with her beautiful slender hands covered with great rings, and her morning-gown a cascade of marvellous old lace. ‘She looks quite twenty years old!’ thought Blanchette. ‘How nice it must be to be married, if one get grown up all at once like that!’

She was so absorbed in her thoughts that she was unusually quiet for a little time, during which her terrible eyes scanned every detail of Yseulte’s appearance, from the pearl solitaire at her throat to the gold buckles in her shoes. Then, with a shriek of laughter, she cried aloud:

‘Do you remember when you came first to us you had leather shoes—leather!—and no heels, and mamma sent you at once to have some proper shoes; and how you could not walk a step in them, and cried?’

‘I remember,’ said Yseulte good-humouredly, ‘but I wonder you do—you were so little.’

‘Oh, I never forget anything,’ replied Blanchette, sagely. ‘What beautiful feet you have now, and you are so grown, so grown! And I want to see all your jewels. Mamma says they are wonderful. I love jewels.’

‘You shall see them, if you like, by-and-bye. But you did see many before my marriage.’

‘But mamma says he has given you ever so many more since—that you were covered with them at your ball.’

‘He is always generous.’

Yseulte smiled as she spoke—the dreamy introspective smile of one who recalls happy hours.

‘Tope-là, while it lasts,’ said the small cynic before her.

‘Hush,’ said Yseulte, with some disgust.

‘Papa never gives mamma anything,’ pursued Blanchette. ‘Papa gives heaps of things to Mdlle. Fraise; the one they call Rose Fraise. She plays; she has eyes like saucers; she is at the Variétés; she rides a roan horse in the Bois of a morning. Don’t you go to the theatre every night? When I marry I shall have a box at every house. I have gone to Hengler’s. Now show me the jewels, will you?’

To humour the child, Yseulte took her to her dressing-room, where the tortoiseshell and silver box, which was the outer shell of the iron fire-proof jewel case, was kept, and told her women to open it. Blanchette remained in an almost religious ecstasy before the treasures exposed to her adoring eyes. Nothing could awe this true child of her century except such a display as she now saw of ropes of pearls, streams of sapphires, emeralds green as the deep sea, diamonds in all possible settings, rare Italian jewels of the Renaissance, and Byzantine and Persian work of the rarest quality. She was, after an hour’s worship, with difficulty persuaded to leave the spot where such divine objects were shut within their silver shrine defended by Chubb’s locks.

‘You are happy!’ she said, with a sigh.

Yseulte glanced at a miniature of Othmar which stood near.

‘That is worth them all!’ she said, and then coloured, vexed that she had betrayed herself to the artificial, satirical mockery of the child.

But Blanchette did not hear; she was thinking of the great diamonds lying like planets and comets fallen out of the sky into their velvet beds.

‘Dis donc,’ she said abruptly, ‘what is your budget for your toilettes? You would not tell me when you married; tell me now.’

‘I do not think it concerns you, my dear, and your mamma knows,’ replied Yseulte.

‘Oh, it made mamma very angry; she said he gave you three times as much as she has; that is why I want to know what it is, because then I should know what hers is. And I know she is in debt so deep!’ and Blanchette held her little hand high above her head. ‘What is the first thing you ordered, Yseulte? Me, I should order a petticoat with valenciennes quite up to the top; like that they are three thousand francs each. Yours are like that? You have got them in all colours, and ever so many white satin ones too? If I were you, I should be all day long with the lingères and costumiers. Are you not with them all day long?’

‘No, I have ordered nothing; I want nothing; I have such quantities of clothes;—if I live to be a hundred I shall never wear them out!——’

‘Wear them out!’ cried Blanchette, with a scream which was as inimitable as a shriek of Judic’s or Jeanne Granier’s. ‘What an expression! One would think you were a doctor’s wife in the provinces. You know you can never wear anything more than three times, and a toilette du soir never but once. Your maids surely tell you that?——’

‘I wear what they put out,’ said Yseulte, a little amused. ‘But I doubt very much whether I shall ever care about chiffons; not in your sense of caring, Blanchette. Of course I like pretty things, but there are so many other ways of spending money.’

‘What ways?’ said the child sharply. ‘Play? Horses? The Bourse? Or do you buy big jewels? It is very safe to buy big jewels; you can run away with them in revolution, sown in your stays——’

‘There is so much to do for the poor,’ said Yseulte, with a little hesitation; she feared to seem to boast of her own charity, yet she thought it wrong to let the child think that she spent all she had selfishly and frivolously.

Blanchette’s little rosy mouth grinned.

‘For the poor? One can quêter; that is always amusing. I stood at the door of S. Philippe after Mass last month, and I got such a bagful of napoleons, and I wore a frock, couleur de feu, and a Henri-Trois hat, and Monseigneur himself kissed me—it was great fun—there was a crowd in the street, and one of them said, “‘Est crâne, la pétiote!” It was a baker’s boy said it; I threw him a napoleon out of the bag.’

‘Oh, Blanchette!—out of the alms money!’

‘Why not? I put a dragée in instead, and I dare say the boy was poor, or he wouldn’t have had a basket on his head. Monseigneur said to mamma that I was one of the children of heaven!’

And Blanchette made her pied de nez, and waltzed round on one foot.

‘You could buy the whole of Siraudin’s and not feel it,’ she resumed enviously. ‘You could buy half Paris they say; why don’t you?’

‘I have all I want,’ said Yseulte; ‘very much more than I want.’

‘That is nonsense; one need never stop wishing——’

‘One must be very ungrateful then,’ said Yseulte. ‘But you can wish as much as you like this morning; you shall have your wishes. Only I should like to hear you wish that Toinon were with you. Poor Toinon, at home with her sore throat!’

‘I don’t wish that at all,’ said Blanchette sturdily. ‘She pinches, she gobbles, and she is vulgar, if you like; she swears like the grooms. You know our rooms overlook the stables; we can hear all the men say when they are cleaning the horses. Toinon makes signals to the English tiger Bob, and he to her. Toinon will only marry someone who keeps a fine meute and good colours for a hunting-dress. She only lives for the Cours Hippique. She got her sore throat because she would go on M. de Rochmont’s break when it was raining.’

‘Poor Toinon! You ought to be so fond of each other. If I had had a sister——’

‘Ab-bah!’ said Blanchette; ‘you would have hated her! I can never have a scrap of pleasure in a new frock because Toinon always has one too; I know I do not make half the effect I should do if I were all alone!’

‘Hush! If Toinon died, only think how sorry you would be!’

Blanchette laughed in silence; she did not dare to say so, but she thought that if Toinon did die it would be a bore in one way, because death always dressed one in black, and shut one up in the house; but otherwise—there were quantities of Toinon’s things which she would like to possess herself, and in especial a set of pink coral, which Toinon’s godmother, the Queen of Naples, had given her, which was delicious. Blanchette’s own godmother was but little use to her, being a most religious and most rigid Marquise, who dwelt on her estates in a lonely part of La Vendée, and only made her presents of holy books and crucifixes and relics in little antique boxes.

‘Do you know, Yseulte,’ she continued, with her persistent prattle, as she hopped round the room, examining and appraising as accurately as a dealer at the Drouot the treasures which it contained, ‘they make bets about you at the clubs? How nice that is! Nobody is anything in Paris till the clubs do that. Papa and the Marquis have a hundred thousand francs on it, and mamma laughs;—they think I don’t hear these things, but I do.’

‘Bets on me?’ repeated Yseulte in wonder. ‘Why should they bet about me?’

‘Oh, they bet as to whether you will be the first to flanquer Count Othmar, or he you. They often make that sort of bet when people marry. Papa is all for you; he says you will be flanquée, and bear it like an angel,—“like a two-sous print of S. Marie!” said mamma.’

Yseulte coloured with natural indignation.

‘You have no right to repeat such things if you hear them, Blanchette,’ she said, with only a vague idea of the child’s meaning. ‘You might make great mischief. If Count Othmar were to know——’

‘Bah!’ said Blanchette. ‘You will not tell him. You are in love with him; they all say so; it is what they laugh at: it is what they bet about—how long it will last, who will get him away first, what you will do, whether you will take some one else. Papa says you will not; mamma says you will: they quarrel ever so often about it. You see,’ continued Blanchette, with her mixture of blasé cynicism and childish naïveté, which made her say the most horrible things with only a half perception of their meaning, ‘they all only marry for that, to be able to take some one else; that is why it does not matter if one’s husband is as old as the Pont Neuf and as ugly as Punch. You happen to be in love with your’s, and he is handsome; but it only makes them laugh, and he was never in love with you—mamma says so; he married you because he was angry with Madame Napraxine, and he wanted to do something to vex her.’

Blanchette, who was given to such ruthless analysis of other people, did not dissect her own emotions, so that she was ignorant of the malice which actuated her speech, of the unconscious longing which moved her to put a thorn in the rose. She wanted all those jewels for herself! She knew very well she could not have them, that she would be laughed at by Toinon and everybody if it were known she wished for them; still, the longing for them made it pleasant to her to plant her little poisoned dagger in the happy breast of her cousin. But she paused, for once frightened at the sudden paleness of her cousin’s face.

Yseulte gave a little low cry, like a wounded animal; she felt the air grow grey, the room go round her, for a moment, with the intensity of her surprise, the shock of her pain. But in another moment she recovered herself; she repulsed, almost without pausing to examine it, a suspicion which was an offence to himself and her. She laid her hand on the little gay figure of the cruel child, and stopped her in her airy circuit of the room, with a gesture so grave, a rebuke so calm, that even Blanchette was awed.

‘My little cousin,’ she said, with an authority and a serenity which seemed all at once to add a score of years to her age, ‘you can jest with me, and at me, as much as ever you like, I shall forgive it and I shall never forget all I owed once to your mother; but if you venture to speak again of my husband without respect, I shall not forgive it. I shall close his house to you, and I shall tell your parents why I do so.’

Blanchette looked furtively up in her face, and understood that she was not to be trifled with. She began to whimper, and then to laugh, and then to murmur in the coaxing way she had when she had been most in fault.

‘How grand you have grown, and how old in twelve months! You know I only talked nonsense; I never heard them say a word; I only wanted to teaze you; it is so silly, you see, Yseulte, to be so in love with M. Othmar, it is so bourgeoise and so stupid, and they all say that it is not the way to keep him. Me, when I marry, I will always make my husband call me Madame, and I will never let him touch but the tip of my little finger, and I will eat oysters every day, and drive the horse that wins the Grand Prix in my basket in the Bois. Dis, donc! you will not tell mamma I said anything naughty?’

‘I shall not tell her,’ said Yseulte, who could not so quickly smile. She felt as if some one had run a needle straight through her heart.

Blanchette laid her curly head against her cousin’s breast:

‘I do love you, Yseulte,’ she murmured. ‘You are always true, and you are always kind, and you are so handsome, so handsome! Mercié, and all the sculptors say so; and all the painters too. The Salon will be full of your busts and your portraits; Madame Napraxine is only a pale woman with great black eyes like coals in a figure of snow——’

‘I desire you not to speak of Madame Napraxine!’ said Yseulte, with a violence which startled herself and momentarily shook her self-control.

The child, who had ignorantly meant to atone and to console for her previous offence, was genuinely alarmed at her failure.

‘I only meant that you are much prettier, much handsomer, than she is,’ she stammered.

‘Madame Napraxine’s beauty is celebrated,’ said Yseulte, with enforced calmness. ‘Leave off your habit of indulging in personalities, Blanchette; it is a very vulgar fault, and it makes you malicious for the pleasure of fancying yourself witty. Come and feed my peacocks; they are birds who will recommend themselves to your esteem, for they are intensely vain, artificial, and egotistic; they believe flowers only grow that they may pull them to pieces.’

‘I don’t care for the peacocks,’ said Blanchette. ‘Drive me in the Bois in the Daumont with the four white horses, and you can buy me something at Siraudin’s as we go.’

‘As you like,’ said Yseulte.

Yseulte humoured the child’s caprices, and drove her out into the cold sparkling air with the four white horses, with their postilions in black velvet caps and jackets, which Blanchette condescended to praise as the most chic thing in all Paris. It was on the tip of her tongue to say that they were even more chic than the Napraxine black horses and Russian coachman, but she restrained herself, unwilling to offend her cousin before they stopped on their return from the Bois at Giroux’s, at Siraudin’s, and at Fontane’s, for Blanchette was too sensible to be satisfied with toys and bonbons, and set her affections on three monkeys in silver-gilt, playing at see-saw on a tree trunk of jade, with little caps made of turquoises on their heads.

When she had chattered herself tired, and the day was declining, she consented to allow herself to be driven home, and Yseulte returned alone to the Boulevard S. Germain. For the first time since her marriage her heart was heavy. The selfishness and greed of her little companion were nothing new to her, but they had been made painfully evident in that drive through Paris; and the wound which the child had given her still smarted, as the bee-sting throbs after the insect has flown away. It was not that she believed what was said; she was too loyal and too innocently sure of her husband’s affection to dishonour him by such suspicion. Yet the mere knowledge that such things were said of him and herself hurt her delicacy and her pride cruelly, and she knew well that, if the Duchesse de Vannes said so, then the world said so too. And her heart contracted as she thought involuntarily, ‘Why should they speak of Madame Napraxine at all in connection with me, unless—unless he had loved her?’

Yseulte was too young to think with composure of the women who had preceded herself in the affections of her husband; she could not console herself, as older or colder women would have done, with the reflection that every man has many passions, and that the past should be a matter of indifference to one who was indissolubly united with his present and his future. To her it seemed that if he had ever loved any one else he could not care for her; all the ignorance and exaggeration of youth made this seem a certainty to her.

She was no longer the calm and innocent child that she had been at Millo; the passions of humanity had become to stir in her; love, the great creator and the great destroyer, had taken possession of her, and had roused in her impulses, jealousies, desires, of whose existence she had never dreamed; her temperament, naturally sweet and spiritual, had beneath it unknown springs of ardour and of passions: le vin mousseux, which her cousin Alain had said was latent in her blood from the impetuous and voluptuous race of her fathers. She could not wholly recover from the shock which she had received, as from a bolt that fell from sunny skies. It had been only a child’s frothy foolish chatter, no doubt; yet the mere suggestion made in it clung to her memory with a cruel and terrible persistency. She did not doubt that the child had only repeated what she had heard; she knew that Blanchette’s memory was as retentive as a telephone; and if the Duchesse de Vannes had said it, then the world had thought it. She had not allowed Blanchette to perceive the pain that she had caused; but as her horses had flashed through the chill bright frosty air of Paris, and the child’s gay shrill voice had chattered incessantly beside her, she had suffered the first moments of anguish that she had known since her marriage. As she drove now through the streets of Paris, in which the lamps were beginning to sparkle through the red of the winter sunset, she felt a strange sense of solitude amidst those gay and hurrying crowds through which her postboys forced their fretting horses.

At Amyôt, on the days when Othmar had left her, she had never felt alone; she had amused herself with the dogs, the birds, the horses, the woods; she had dreamed over her classic music, or read some book which he had recommended, and spent hours looking from the balustrade of the great terrace, or from the embrasure of a window to watch for the first appearance in the avenue of the horses which should bring him from the station of Beaugency. She had never felt alone at Amyôt, but here in the city which she loved from the associations of childhood, and as the scene of her marriage, in this city which regarded her as one of the most fortunate of its favourites of fortune, she felt a sense of utter loneliness as the carriage rolled through the gates.

The suisse told her that Othmar had not come home.

She went upstairs to her boudoir and threw off her close-fitting-coat of sables and her sable hat, and sat down beside the olive-wood fire, drawing off her long gloves. The room was softly lighted with a rose-tinted light which shone on the gay children painted by Bougereau, the flowered satin of the curtains and couches, the Dresden frames of the mirrors, the marqueterie of the tables and consoles, the bouquets of roses of all growths and colours. She looked round it with a little sigh; with the same sense of chillness and sadness. Everything in it seemed to echo the cruel words: ‘He only married you to anger her!’

In the morning the whole chamber had seemed to smile at her from all the thousand trifles, which spoke in it of his tender thoughtfulness for herself; now, the roses in their bowls, the children on their panels, the amorini holding up the mirrors, the green parrots swinging in their rings, all seemed to say with one voice, ‘What if he never loved you?’

Her arms rested on her knees and her face on her hands, as she sat in a low chair before the fire which burned under white marble friezes of the Daphnephoria, carved by the hand of Clésinger. She could never ask him, she could never ask any one, of this cruel doubt, which had come into her perfect peace as a worm comes into a rose. All her pride shrank from the thought of laying bare such a wound. Not even in the confessional could she have brought herself to breathe a whisper of it. She was not yet seventeen years old, and she had already a doubt which, like the pains of maternity, she must shut in her heart and bear as best she might alone. She had both courage and resignation in her nature, and she needed both.

‘It is impossible!’ she murmured unconsciously, half aloud, as the memory of a thousand caresses and gestures, which seemed to her to be proof of the most absolute love, came to her thoughts with irresistible persuasion, and made her face grow warm with blushes even in her solitude. It was impossible that he did not love her—he who had been free to choose from the whole world.

‘It is impossible!’ she murmured, with her head lifted as though in some instinct of combat against some unseen foe.

‘What is impossible?’ said Othmar, as he entered the room and approached behind her, unseen until he had drawn her head backward and kissed her on the eyes. ‘What is impossible, my child?’ he repeated. ‘No wish of yours if you tell it to me.’

She coloured very much, and rose, and remained silent. Her heart was beating fast; she did not know what to reply. By the light of the fire he did not see how red she grew and then how pale. He seated himself in a low chair and took her by the hand.

‘What is so impossible,’ he said carelessly, ‘that you dream of it in my absence in the dark?’

‘Nothing,—at least,—I would rather not say,’ she murmured.

‘As you like,’ said Othmar. ‘You know I am not Blue Beard, my dear.’

A great longing rushed through her to tell him what the Duchesse de Vannes had said, and ask him if it were true or false—he who alone could know the secrets of his own heart,—but sensitiveness, timidity, delicacy, pride, all made her mute. What use would it be to ask him? He would never wound her with the truth if the truth were what her cousin had said.

Othmar smiled kindly as he looked at her; she did not know that if he had loved her more he would have been more curious before this, her first secret, less willingly resigned to be shut out from her confidence.

‘Who has been with you to-day?’ he asked. ‘Oh, I remember, you have had little Blanchette. What a terrible child; she is an Elzevir compendium of the century. Has she said anything to vex you? She is as malicious as Mascarille——’

Yseulte touched his hand timidly. There was a grain of fear in her adoration of him, that fear which enters into all great love, though Nadine Napraxine and Madame de Vannes would have ridiculed it as ‘jeu de lac et de nacelle,’ the ‘vieux jeu’ of the romanticists and sentimentalists.

‘You do love me?’ she said, very low, with much hesitation, while her colour deepened.

Othmar looked up quickly with a certain irritation.

‘Has that pert baby told you to doubt it? Can that be a question between you and me? My dear child, would you be by me now if I did not do so?’

And he soothed her agitation by those caresses with which a man can so easily and with pleasure to himself counterfeit warmth and tenderness to a woman who has youth and grace and cheeks as soft as the wing of a bird.

‘Yseulte,’ he said gravely a few moments later, ‘do not listen to what other women say to you; if you do, you will lose your beautiful serenity and fret yourself vainly by doubts and fancies. There is nothing on earth so cruel to a woman as women. They envy you—not for me—but for what you possess through me and for the face and form with which nature has dowered you. Do not let them poison your peace. I am not afraid that they will corrupt your heart, but I am afraid that they may distress and disturb you. We cannot live all our lives in seclusion at Amyôt, and the world must come about you soon or late. To be in the world means to be surrounded with jealousies, cruelties, enmities, ingratitude, and malice; if we once lend our ear to what these will tell us, we shall have no more happiness. You have been like your favourite, S. Ignace; by reason of your own purity you have been allowed to hear the angels sing. Do not let the world’s clamour drown that divine song, for once lost no one ever hears it again! Do you understand what I mean, my dear?’

She said nothing, but she hid her face on his breast and burst into tears, the first that he had ever seen from her eyes.

‘Can they not let her alone,’ he thought with anger, and a sense of weariness and apprehension; if the world taught her what men’s love could be, would she not discover what was missing in his?

CHAPTER XXXVI.

When the three black horses of the Princess Napraxine, with their manes flying in the wind, their eyes flashing, and their nostrils breathing fire, dashed down the Champs Elysées to make the tour du Bois, all Paris looked after her, and multitudes who only knew her by repute took off their hats to her as they had used to do in a bygone time to the golden-haired empress.

‘Ah, if I had been in that woman’s place in ‘seventy-one,’ she thought once, ‘I would not have run away in a cab with Evans the dentist; I would have put on a white gown and all my diamonds, and gone out before them on to the terrace of the Tuileries—they would have forgotten Sedan, and would have worshipped me! I cannot forgive people who have the happiness of great opportunities for not rising to be equal to them. One can but die once, and it must be essentially delightful to die amidst a roll of drums, a blaze of sunset, a storm of welcome. The death of Desaix at Marengo is the ideal death.’

There was at the bottom of her soul, despite her languor, ennui, and pessimism, a certain heroic element; life seemed to her so poor a thing, so stupid, so illogical, that if it went out in fire it vindicated itself in a measure.

‘Sometimes, do you know,’ she said once to a sympathetic companion, ‘I think I might have been something great if I had been born in the time for it; all depends upon that. Mdlle. de Sombreuil would have lived and died like ten thousand other Frenchwomen, in the monotony of the vie de château, if she had not happened to be alive under the Terror. What possibility of any greatness is there for a woman who lives nowadays in what calls itself the great world? The very men who have any genius in it are dwarfed by it. Modern life is so trivial, yet so absorbing; it is such a bed of down and such a bed of prickles; it is such a sleeping-potion and such a whip of nettles, that we have no time to think about anything but itself. You must live “à l’abri des hommes,” if you want to be of higher stature than they are. Bismarck is a colossus, because he shuts himself up in Varzin so constantly. It is very hard even for men to resist the presence of the world; even Tennyson leaves Farringford in the primrose month to court a vulgar apotheosis in the London drawing-rooms; and for a woman who finds herself from birth upward in that milieu there is no resistance possible. We are born to dress, to drive, to dine, to dance, to set the fashion in all kinds of things,—and that is all. If we are clever, we do mischief in meddling with the hidden cards of diplomacy or statecraft, and if we are light-minded we do a different manner of mischief in making all sorts of vices look pretty and distinguished to those below us, who are always endeavouring to imitate us; but more than that we cannot do. The morphine has been injected into our veins; we cannot resist its influence; there is a kind of excitement and somnolence, both at once, in the routine of our world which none of us can resist. If we have any brains, perhaps we make resolutions to resist, but we do not keep them; the world we live in is idiotic but it is irresistible. When we wake, we see the heap of invitation cards on our table; we yawn, but we yield, and we fill up our book of engagements; the day is crowded, so is the year; and so life slips away hurried, tired, thinking itself amused. Sometimes I think I should like to live amongst the corn-fields and the larchwoods, and do good, and I dare say I shall when I am old, or, what is still worse than old, middle-aged. But you know one does not do good in that way; one always gets imposed on, and the Jew money-lender in the centre of the village would be really the person who would profit by one’s charities. It is quite easy for stupid people to be happy; they believe in fables and they trot on in a beaten track like a horse on a tramway. But when you have some intelligence, and have read something besides your breviary, and have studied the philosophy of life a little, it is much more difficult to content yourself. My friends who are putting on blisters and bandages at the hospitals, fancy they are on the way to eternal salvation, but a political economist would tell them that they were only doing a vast deal of mischief, upsetting the nicely-balanced arrangements of Nature. Myself, I think, Nature has very little to do with the world as it is in the nineteenth century in Europe. I do not think Nature, left to herself, would create either cripples or cancers, any more than she would yoke bullocks or cut terriers’ tails.’

She had accompanied her friends the Dames du Calvaire more than once to those hospitals, where patrician hands touched the leper’s sores and the idiot’s ulcers; but her delicate taste had been revolted, and her intelligence, nurtured on shrewd and satiric philosophies, had rejected the idea that any good was done by great ladies transforming themselves into sick nurses of disease. She thought it must be infinitely delightful to be able to delude yourself in that kind of way, to think that you pleased Deity by putting on a poultice and averted a social cataclysm by washing a cretin, but she did not believe in that kind of thing herself. She did not see how any one could do so who had thought about life, and the rest of it.

‘I dare say I am quite useless,’ she would reply to those who tried to convince her, ‘but then so many things are. Who has ever found out the use of butterflies, or of daisies, or of a nautilus, or of a nightingale, or of those charming rosy clouds which drift about at sunset? I do not see the utility of prolonging the horrible and miserable lives of lepers and of idiots in hospitals and asylums. Humanity is not in the least served; it is much more often profoundly noxious and disgusting. Even the people who talk about its sanctity, do not believe in what they say, or war would become an impossibility, and so would all the factories which, as Victor Hugo has said, take the soul out of man to put it into machinery.’

When she spoke in this way she was very much in earnest, and her arguments were very hard to refute; and even Melville went out of her presence with an uncomfortable, though unacknowledged, sense that his whole life had been a mistake based on a bubble which had all the hues of the rainbow, indeed, but no more than a bubble’s solidity. When the men of science, with whom she sometimes amused herself by playing the part of the great Catherine to the Encyclopædists, came into her presence, they fared no better than the priests, and she did not believe in them a whit the more.

‘Five hundred years hence, your ideas and your discoveries will all be refuted and ridiculed,’ she said to them, ‘as you now refute and ridicule the physiology of the Greeks and Latins; you will not find the key to the mystery of creation by torturing dogs or chaining horses on a bed of agony.’

And she listened to them, but she laughed at them. To the satirical clearness of her highly-trained intelligence the delirium of science was quite as much a malady of the mind as were the rhapsodies of religion.

‘La science est la grande névrose du moment; ça passera,’ she said once to Claude Bernard.

In Paris, Nadine Napraxine was what the world had made her; she was the élégante of her period, a hothouse flower of fragile beauty, of absolute indolence, of hypercritical taste, of utter and entire uselessness. In her carriage or her sleigh, under her pile of silver fox skins; on a Tuesday at the Français, and on a Saturday at the Grand Opéra; on her Thursdays at her ‘cinq heures,’ when the most exclusive of crowds gathered in her drawing-rooms; in the few great assemblies and balls to which she deigned to carry her listless grace and her marvellous jewels; throughout her self-absorbed day, which began at noon and ended at dawn, she was a cocodette of the most exquisite grace and of the most incredible extravagance, such as Paris had known her to be from the second year of her marriage. Her caprices were unending, her changefulness was incalculable, her expenditure was enormous; the most exaggerated tales were told of her hauteur and of her exclusiveness, yet were not much beyond the truth; and men worshipped her, and women intrigued for her notice, just because she was so unapproachable and could be insolent. Fragile and white as the narcissus flower, which she always took as her emblem, with a voice ever sweet and low, and the most perfect manner in the world, she could be as cruel in all the cruelties of society as ever her ancestors had been with knout and steel in their frosty fastnesses. It amused her to see the timid recoil, the presumptuous shrink, the confident wither into humiliation, before the chillness of her smile, the terror of her few cold softly-spoken words.

‘I am the only scavenger that Europe has left,’ she said once. ‘All the others have been frightened by the democracy, but I frighten the democracy, or, at least, I keep it out of my drawing-rooms. It may get into the “Almanac de Gotha,” but it will not get past my suisse and up my staircase.’

Now and then she had been known to do exceedingly kind things, just as in the midst of her worldly life she would go now and then to a discourse at the Academy or to a séance at the Sorbonne. But they had been always done to persons quite simple and frank, who never affronted her with presumption or disgusted her with pretension. To a lie of any sort she was inexorable.

The Hôtel Napraxine was one of the most delightful houses in Europe. It stood near the entrance of the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, and was withdrawn from every inquisitive glance which might be cast on it from the road, within gardens large enough to contain groves of lime trees and plane trees, fountains, lawns, pavilions, and terraces of rose-coloured marbles. No disturbing echo of the traffic of Paris could reach the sensitive ear of its sovereign lady when she sank to sleep under the white satin of her shell-shaped ivory bed.

All the finest French artists living had been summoned to its adornment within.

‘All modern rooms are only like so many bonbon-boxes,’ she had said. ‘At least my bonbon-boxes shall be well-painted.’

And Meissonier, Duran, Baudry, Cabanel, Henner, Legros, had all signed some panel, some ceiling, some staircase, chimney-piece, or salon-wall in this most exquisite of houses.

‘It is really charming,’ she said to herself, when she reached it on that first grey, chill, misty morning of her arrival, and its delicious colour and warm air and flower-filled twilight welcomed her after the long dull journey across Europe. It was especially perfect to her this day because for some fifty hours at least her husband would not come thither. There was only one thing ever discordant in its perfect harmonies. When Platon Napraxine came up the staircase—with its black-and-white marbles, its pale-blue velvet carpets, its sculptures by Clésinger, and its wall-paintings by Baudry,—when he came up under the leaves of the bananas and the palms, and entered her own sanctuary, his broad tall form, his heavy step, his Kalmuck face were dissonant and absurd in it all, and irritated her sense of fitness, and annoyed her like a false note in the middle of a classic symphony.

‘Poor Platon!’ she thought more than once; ‘I have certainly been the most expensive whim that he has ever had; and he has never got the slightest entertainment out of me. I am very disagreeable to him; I have always been disagreeable to him. I was so at first because I could not help it, and I am so now because I like to be so. But I grant that it has never been quite fair to him. He might just as well have been all alone to amuse himself with his dancers, and comic singers, and people; I have been a white elephant to him. Certainly he has a kind of triumph in possessing the white elephant; he likes to feel I am here; when they all look after me in the Bois, or at the Opéra, he likes to think I belong to him. As somebody said, when people admire what is ours, it is as if they admired us. I am very much to him what the bleu ciel Sèvres for which he gave ten thousand pounds must be to Lord Dudley. The Sèvres is of no earthly use to him, and he would scarcely dare to touch it, and he would certainly never eat his cutlet or have his venison served on it; but it is something that everybody envies him, that nobody else has. When Platon gives great dinners to sovereigns and all kinds of gros bonnets, and I am opposite to him, I am sure he has the sort of feeling that Lord Dudley has about that bleu ciel service. After all, that is something; though, as the service was incomplete in quantity, so I am incomplete in sentiment. And then, when I meet him driving Mdlle. Chose in the Champs Elysées, I seem as if I did not see him; and I never say a syllable of objection if there are a hundred paragraphs in the petits journaux about himself and any number of Mdlles. Chose. If I had ever liked him, I should be angry and make a fuss. After all, he ought to know that, if indifference be not flattery, it is peace.’

So she soothed her conscience, but not always successfully; she had occasionally a passing touch of self-reproach, when she remembered how very little she had given her husband in return for the magnificent fortune, the boundless admiration, and the perfect independence, which she owed to him. She had at the bottom of her heart, though stifled and indistinct, a more sensitive and a higher-toned honour than most women; that instinct of honour told her that she had been, at all times, unjust and ungrateful to a man whose good qualities she refused to see, and even did her best to destroy, because his relation to her irritated her taste and temper, and his ugliness and want of intelligence filled her with disdain.

‘If I had a daughter,’ she thought, in those moments of candour and compunction, ‘I think I should say to her, “Commit any sin and incur any sorrow you like rather than make a marriage without sympathy; it is the one crime which society has agreed to applaud as an act of wisdom and of virtue; but it is a crime nevertheless. One is so young, one does not know; one listens to people who urge all the advantages of it, and when one does know it is too late.” However,’ she added in her own musings, ‘I dare say, if I had daughters, when they were old enough, I should do just the same as everybody else does; I should want them to make a beau mariage, and I should tell them to do it. It is the world which makes one like that. At the fair of Novgorod I once saw a little Simbirsh peasant arrested for stealing a necklace of blue and yellow beads; she burst out sobbing, and said she would not have taken it, but all the girls of her village had all their big beads, and she had none! In the big world we do the same. We want the big beads because other people have theirs. It is paltry; but then society is paltry at its best. They say, when you have entered an opium house, you may have made all the resolutions you will against smoking, you cannot keep them, the atmosphere gains on you, you yield, and smoke, and sink, like all the rest. The world is an opium house.’

Nature had designed her for something better than the opium house. Her intellect, her courage, and her chastity were all of great and fine quality, like the burnished blade of a sword, that is at once delicate and strong. But the world had absorbed her, and left little scope to those higher and nobler instincts. She was in her habits and her tastes a mere élégante, indolent, hard to please, hypercritical, of languid constitution, of infinite egotism. Given the impetus, this languor could alter, as by magic, into ardour, force, and energy; but the motive power could rarely be found which could rouse her, and she remained for the most part of her time a mere mondaine, of exquisite taste, of irresistible seduction, but useless, idle, contemptuous, cynical, vaguely disappointed, though all were at her feet, wanting, petulantly, like Alexander, more worlds to conquer. Sometimes in the ennui of the whole thing, and her dissatisfaction in it, she was only restrained from absolute evil by the consciousness of its vulgarity, and her own aversion to those indulgences in which most find their strongest temptation, but in which she only saw a humiliating and a grotesque affinity to the brutes.

As at four years old she had shrugged her small shoulders, with a sigh, before the bonbon boxes—‘J’en ai tant!’—so at four-and-twenty years old she was supercilious to the whole world because it had given her so much, and yet had nothing better than that to give. And incredulous that there was anywhere anything better, she lived in her calorifère-heated rooms, like an orchid in a hothouse, and amused herself as with a game by the desires, the pains, the reproaches, the solicitations, the jealousies, which fretted and fumed themselves in that arena of her salon, whilst she remained as tranquil, as pitiless, and as indifferent as fate.

No woman had the world more completely beneath her feet, yet she, like Othmar, was consumed by that eternal ennui which is the penalty of those who possess too much, have seen and heard too much too early, and have been from childhood the objects of adulation and of speculation;—of all those, indeed, who have mind and heart enough not to find all their interests in society, and yet have not that poetic temper which would give them a sure consolation and a safe refuge in the uncloying loveliness of nature.

Ennui is unjustly looked upon as the characteristic of the frivolous type of humanity; on the contrary, the frivolous character is perfectly content with frivolity, and never tires of it. Ennui is rather the mark of those whose taste is too fine and whose instincts are too high to let them be satisfied with the excitement of, and the victories of, society, and yet who have too little of that simplicity, or of that impersonality, which makes the artistic temperament capable of entirely withdrawing from the world and living its own life, self-sustained.

This delicate patrician had the seed in her of great roués, of dauntless conspirators, of haughty territorial tyrants, of men and of women who had emptied thrones and filled them, and given law for life and death to multitudes of vassals; she could not be altogether content with the rosewater politics of modern drawing-rooms, with the harmless rivalry of toilettes and equipages, with the trivial pastimes and as trivial passions of society. She was a woman of the world to the tips of her fingers, yet she could not be altogether content with an existence of Courts, chiffons, flirtations, endless entertainments, and unlimited expenditure.

‘They find us eccentric, capricious, autocratic, us Russians,’ she said one day. ‘I dare say we are so; they forget that, not a century ago, our great-grandparents were slaying Paul and Peter in their palaces, and could knout to death whole villages of men, women, and children, at their mere freak and fancy. I think it is very creditable to us not to be a thousand times worse than we are; our blood is made up of arack and of ice; we are the rude pines of the north French-polished!’

It was three o’clock in the day; she had given orders to be undisturbed. She had slept admirably for eight hours without any morphine. She had bathed twice, on her arrival and on her awaking, in warm water, opaque with otto of rose; she had breakfasted off her usual cup of cream and rolls made of milk. She was in a dreamy, drowsy, amused state of thought; and, as she lay on her couch in the boudoir, which was placed between her library and her dressing-chamber, her thoughts drifted persistently to the meeting of the dawn.

She felt very like Fate now, as she thought how odd it was that the first person she had met in Paris had been Othmar.

‘He is very much changed for so short a time. He is not a whit more content,’ she reflected, with pleasure.

The little room was the prettiest thing in all Paris. ‘It is a casket for a pearl,’ one of her adorers had said, and it seemed really a pity that for eight months out of the year the casket should be closed, and no ray of light ever enter it. Its furniture was of ivory, like that of the adjoining library, bed-room, and bathroom, and its hangings were of silvery satin embroidered with pale roses and apple-blossoms; Baudry had painted the ceiling with the story of Ædon and Procris: the glass in the windows was milk white, and the floor was covered with white bearskins: the atmosphere was like that of a hothouse, and as odorous; there were always a perfect seclusion and silence in it; the only sound which ever came there was the splash of a fountain in the garden below; it might have been set in the heart of the island of Alcina rather than in one of the great avenues of Paris. Here, lying back on one of her low couches with the air around her tropical, vaporous, dreamy, she mused within herself as to how she would deal with Othmar, a smile in her eyes and a doubt in her mind.

‘Let him alone,’ said her conscience.

‘No,’ said her vanity, and perhaps some other emotion also.

‘He never harmed you; he only loved you, and obeyed you, and went away,’ her conscience urged on her. But her vanity replied: ‘That was the worst offence. There are commands which are most honoured by disobedience. There are wounds which ought to be cherished, not healed.’

Unless she chose that it should be otherwise, Othmar, she knew, would be a stranger to her all his life. They would meet, perhaps, in the world very often, but they would exchange commonplace courtesy, and remain as far asunder as two ships that pass each other on the same ocean course, unless she chose. Her better self said to her, ‘Let him alone; he has tried to make another life for himself; he has failed, no doubt, but he has probably found a sort of peace, a kind of affection; if it can console him, do not disturb it.’ But the habits of supremacy and of intrigue, the love of dominion, the intolerance of opposition, which were instinctive in her, and which all her many triumphs and her permitted egotism had fostered and confirmed, forbade her to resign herself to such passivity, and urged her to take up her empire over his life.

And she had a vague wish to see him there again beside her, a wish not very strong, but strong enough to move her. It was here, in this room, that he had first of all told her that he loved her, with words more daring and more imperious than any other had ventured to use in her presence; he was never like other people; he was probably no better, certainly no worse, than other men, but he was different: he pleased her imagination, he touched her sympathy; he was the only man with whom it had ever seemed to her that her life might have been lived harmoniously, with whom she might have understood something of that mystery of love in which she had never believed. To her temper it was the intrigue and intricacy of life which alone made it endurable, the unrolling of the ribbon of fate, the watching and controlling of the comedy of circumstances, which alone made it worth while to rise in the morning to the tedium of its routine.

‘Is life worth living?’ she said once, hearing of the title of a book of drawing-room philosophy. ‘Yes, I think it is, if you are the cat, if you are the spider, if you are the eagle, if you are the dog; not if you are the mouse, or the fly, or the lamb, or the hare. Life is certainly worth living, too, if you regard it as what it is, a dramatic entertainment, diversion. This is the true use of riches, that it enables you to give yourself up to watching and controlling circumstances as if men and women were marionettes; it enables you to sit in your fauteuil and look on without moving unless you wish. I think that life must be always rather tiresome to anybody over ten years old, but the only possible way to endure it is to regard it as a spectacle, as a comedy, or, as Manteuffel has said, that a general sitting in his saddle regards the battlefield he governs.’

This was what she said and felt in her cynical moods, and she was cynical now on her return to Paris; she had left her better self behind her in the snow-drifts of her own country. The woman who had spoken so tenderly of Boganof scarcely existed in her; she lived in an atmosphere of adulation, excitation, ennui, and frivolous occupations. The heroic protectress of the Siberian exile had scarcely a trait in common with her; she spent half the day in the discussion of new costumes with her tailors, and the other half surrounded by flatterers and courtiers in the pursuit of new distractions.

Analysis was so natural to her that it seemed to her in no situation or even crisis of her life would she have abandoned it. There is a well-known physiologist, now head of a famous laboratory, who, when his son died, a boy of twelve, scarcely waited for the child’s last breath to plunge his scalpel into the still warm body in hopes of some discovery of the law of life.[1] If she had had any emotions she would have done a similar thing; she would have dissected them even if they had sprung from her own life blood.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

‘Is Madame Napraxine a good woman?’ said Yseulte timidly one day in her own drawing-room to Melville, whilst she coloured to the eyes as she pronounced the name.

‘Good, my dear!’ echoed Friederich Othmar, who overheard and replied to the question. ‘The epithet is comically incongruous. She would be as horrified if she heard you as if you called her ma bourgeoise.’

Melville laughed a little despite himself, and hesitated before giving his own reply: he was embarrassed. How could he as a priest say to this innocent creature what he as a man of the world knew to be the truth; that the simple classifications of good and bad can no more suffice to describe the varieties of human character than the shepherd’s simple names for herb and flower can suffice for the botanist’s floral nomenclature and complicated subdivisions.

‘She has very noble qualities,’ he said at length. ‘Perhaps they are somewhat obscured by the habits of the world. She is of an exceedingly complicated character. I fear I scarcely know her well enough to describe her with perfect correctness. But I know some noble acts of her life; one I may tell you.’

And he related to her the episode of Boganof.

Yseulte listened with wonder: to her youthful imagination her one enemy appeared in all the dark hues with which youth ever paints what it dislikes and dreads, exaggerated like the rainbow light with which it decks what it loves. All the highest instincts of her nature were touched to sympathy by what she now heard, but a pain of which Melville knew nothing contracted her heart as she thought that if her husband had indeed loved such a woman as this, it was natural that she would for ever retain her power on him.

‘And she is so beautiful!’ she added, with a little sigh. Melville looked at her in surprise.

‘Who has been talking to her?’ he wondered as he said aloud:

‘There are women more beautiful. You have but to look in your mirror, my child. But she has a surpassing grace, an incomparable fascination, some of which springs, perhaps, from her very defects. She is a woman essentially of the modern type, all nerves and scepticism intermingled; ironical, incredulous, indifferent, yet capable of heroic coups de tête; dissatisfied with the worldly life and yet incapable of living any other; the Réné of Chateaubriand, made female and left without a God.’

‘Except her tailor!’ said Friederich Othmar, who approached the little nook in which Melville was seated in the boudoir.

‘Pardon me,’ said Melville, with a smile. ‘Madame Napraxine’s tailor is but her slave, like every one else whom she employs or encounters. The king of couturiers trembles before her, he is so afraid of her displeasure; if she blame his creations they are ruined. She makes la pluie et le beau temps in the world of fashion.’

‘And yet she could do what you say for that unhappy man in Siberia?’ murmured Yseulte, who had listened with seriousness and some perplexity to all that had been said of one in whom her instinct felt was the enemy of her life.

‘You should understand a character which is made up of contradictions, my dear,’ interrupted the Baron; ‘for you have one beside you every day in Otho’s. Your own is formed with just a few broad, simple, fair lines, ruled very straight on the old pattern, which was in use before the Revolution, or even farther back than that, in the days of Anne of Bretagne and of Blanche of Castille. But your husband’s—and some other people’s—is a tangled mass of unformed desires and of widely-opposed qualities which are for ever in conflict, and are as unsatisfactory and as indefinite as any impressionniste’s picture.’

Yseulte did not hear; she was absorbed in her own reflections; her face was very grave.

‘M. le Baron, you cannot have everything,’ said Melville, gaily. ‘Your age has destroyed the femme croyante. Nature, which always avenges herself, gives you the femme du monde, which, in its lowest stages, becomes the cabotine, and in its highest just such an ethereal, capricious, tantalising combination of the finest culture and the most languid scepticism, as captivates and tortures her world in the person of the Princess Napraxine.’

‘Excuse me in my turn if I say that you are quite mistaken,’ said Friederich Othmar. ‘The two species of womankind have existed since the days of Athens and of Rome, and modern theology and modern scepticism have nothing to do with either of them. Penelope and Circe are as old as the islands and the seas. If you will not find me impertinent, I cannot help saying that ecclesiastics always remind me of the old story (I think it is in Moore’s Diary) of the grazier’s son who went to Switzerland, and was only impressed by one fact—that bullocks were very cheap there. Christianity is a purely modern thing. What are eighteen centuries in the history of the world? Yet every churchman refers every virtue and every vice of human nature to the influence or the absence of this purely modern creed, which has, after all, not one tenth of the magnetic power of absorption of Buddhism and nothing like the grasp on the mind of a multitude which Islamism has possessed.’

Friederich Othmar had always an especial pleasure in teazing Melville, and in contemplating the address with which the trained talent of the theologian vaulted over the difficulties which his reason was forced to acknowledge.

As Melville was about to reply, the groom of the chambers entered and announced ‘Madame la Princesse Napraxine.’

Yseulte rose with a startled look upon her young face, which was not yet trained to conceal what she felt beneath that mask of serenity and smiling indifference which makes the most impenetrable of all masks. Her cheeks flushed, her eyes had a momentary look of bewilderment. She did not hear the words of graceful greeting with which her visitor answered the courtesy she mechanically made.

Melville, who himself felt a little guilty, hastened to her rescue, and the Baron, as he rolled a low chair for the newcomer, thought to himself, ‘What a pity Otho is not here; it is always better to have those situations gone through, and over. The poor child!—so happy as she has been! It will be a pity if Circe come. But Circe always comes. How can Melville pretend that Circe is anything new, or has only sprung into existence because women do not go to church! Madame Napraxine is precisely the same kind of charmeresse that Propertius used to write odes to on his tablets; the type was more consistent then, because in our days costume is incongruous, and life is more complicated, and people are more tired, but it remains integrally the same.’

Nadine Napraxine meanwhile was saying:

‘Your people were unwilling to let me in because it was not your day; but I insisted. When one desires a thing very much one always insists till one gets it. I find Paris talking of nothing but the Countess Othmar; I was eager to claim from her the privilege of an old friend.’

It was said with sweetness, apparent frankness, and all her own inimitable grace. She lightly touched, with the softest, slightest kiss, the cheeks of Yseulte, which grew warm and then cold. Not appearing to notice her embarrassment, Nadine Napraxine continued to string her pretty, careless, courteous phrases together with that tact which is the most useful and the most graceful of all the talents. Yseulte had all a girl’s embarrassment before her, and that dignity which was an instinct in her became, by contrast, almost stiffness.

‘Someone has told her of me,’ thought Nadine, with amusement and irritation combined. It at once offended her and pleased her that she should be a source of pain to this girl—to how many women had she been so, and without mercy! Well, why would they not learn to keep to themselves the wandering thoughts of their lovers and their lords? ‘This child is beautiful,’ she said to herself with candour; ‘how can she fail with him. No doubt she loves him herself; men are not thankful. Tenez la dragée haute is the only motto for their subjection.’

She studied Yseulte with attention and interest, and without malice. She frankly admired this beauty so different to her own; this union of high-bred stateliness and childish naïveté which seemed to her just such a manner as some young châtelaine of some old Breton or Norman tower would have had in the days of the Reine Isabeau; she did full justice to it. The irritation she had felt when she had walked in the moonlight through the grass lands at Zaraïzoff, and thought of the château of Amyôt, had ceased the moment that she had entered the atmosphere of Paris. Othmar had believed that he had been cold as marble in that momentary meeting, but she had seen in it that her power over him was undiminished. She knew very well that soon or late he who had defied her would be once more as a reed in her hands. She was in no haste to try her force; she could rely on it in the calmness of certainty. She was very amiable to his wife; but she had a little touch of good-natured condescension in her amiability which made the pride of the girl shrink as under an affront which could not be resented; the very young always suffer under a kindness which tacitly reminds them, by its unspoken superiority, of their own inexperience and their own defects. The ironical smile, the slight suggestive phrases, the very indulgence, as to a child, of Nadine Napraxine were as so many thorns in the heart of Yseulte, who had none of that vanity which might have rendered her indifferent to them.

It was not so much an emotion, but a certain sentiment—half interest, half irritation—which brought her to the great house of which, in a moment of impulse, he had made this child mistress. ‘They try to give it a false air of home,’ she thought, with her merciless accuracy of penetration, ‘but they do not succeed. It is always a barn—a barn gilded and painted like Versailles: but a barn. Perhaps they succeed better at Amyôt, and perhaps they do not. He always hated this huge house, and he was very right in his taste. It is made to entertain in, not to be happy in. If he were happy he would go far away to that castle by the blue Adrian Sea that I saw within a few leagues of Miramar.’

With that thought she had gone through the succession of great rooms, grand and uninteresting as the rooms of the Escurial, until she had reached one of the drawing-rooms, with its painted panels of children romping in orchards and gardens, and there had found Yseulte sitting at her tapestry like some young dame of the time of Bayard or the Béarnais, a large hound at her feet, the two old men beside her.

‘What colouring! She is like a pastel of Emile Lévy’s!’ she had thought, with an appreciation which was entirely sincere, as she kissed the girl’s reluctant, roseleaf-like cheek: she really felt not the slightest ill-will towards her; on the contrary, she was moved to a compassion, none the less genuine that it was based on something very like disdain; the disdain of the wise for the simple, of the certainly victorious for the predestined vanquished, of the snake-charmer for those who let the snake kill them.

With her most charming grace, with that seduction which made it impossible for anyone in her presence to be her enemy, she renewed her acquaintance with the wife of Othmar, speaking pretty and gracious words of recognition and of admiration. Yseulte preserved a self-control admirable for one so young, to whom the necessities for such reserve were a new and painful lesson; but she was unable to keep the change of colour in her cheeks, and the expression in her candid eyes betrayed her to the quick perception of her guest.

‘You have come to honour Paris, Princess?’ said the Baron, to cover the embarrassment and the constraint of Yseulte.

‘One always comes to Paris, Baron,’ answered Nadine Napraxine, raising her eyeglass and gazing at the girl through it, with all the cruel, careless scrutiny of a woman of the world; her luminous eyes wanted no assistance of the sort, but it was a weapon—unkind as a dagger on occasion. ‘One always comes to Paris. It is the toy-shop where we dolls of the world get mended when we are battered and bruised. We come for our hair, for our teeth, for our complexions; at any rate, for our gowns; and then when we arrive we remain. The Republic may push its iron roller, as Berlioz says it does, over the world; it rolls on wheels of lead; but it cannot prevent Paris from being always an empire, and always the urbs for us. I do not love Paris as passionately as most Russians do, yet even I admit that there is no other city where one finds so little monotony. Even in Paris, alas! as Marivaux said long ago, everybody has two eyes, one nose, and one mouth, and one sighs in vain for a little variety of outline.’

‘If I remember,’ said the Baron, ‘Marivaux was more merciful to humanity than is Madame Napraxine; he admitted that even with such homely materials as two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, one could obtain infinite variety in expression; no two physiognomies are alike.’

‘Perhaps in Marivaux’s time men did not imitate the chic anglais!’ said Nadine Napraxine. ‘I see very little variety myself. Everybody is terribly like everyone else, except the Comtesse Othmar,’ she added, with her charming smile, ‘who is only like Hope nursing Love, or some other picture of a fairer day than ours.’

Yseulte, pained at herself for her want of self-command, coloured hotly under the compliment, in which her alarmed sensitiveness fancied there was hidden a sarcasm. She did not know of what picture Nadine Napraxine spoke, and she thought—‘Does she mean that Hope was barren and foolish, that Love did not care?’ She remembered the silver amorino and the empty gourd.

Directly appealed to, a moment later, she murmured something at random; she did not well know what; she grew first pale, then red; she seemed constrained and stupid, void of ideas, and stiff in manner. Friederich Othmar could have broken his cane about her shoulders in his vexation.

‘Heavens and earth!’ he thought, ‘if you let yourself be magnetised at the first sight of an imagined rival, what will you do before the reality when you meet it? My poor little girl! It is not the women who adore a man, and are struck dumb because they see another woman whom he has once loved, who obtain any influence over him, or possess any charm whatever for him. Who is to tell you that? who is to open your eyes and harden your heart? who is to make you understand that you are as lovely as the morning, but that if you do not acquire self-control, wit, indifference, all the armoury of the world’s weapons, she will pass over you as artillery sweeps over the daisy in the grass.’

But he could not say his impatient thoughts aloud; he could not even, by his own readiness of language and easy persiflage, contrive wholly to hide the uneasiness and restraint which the presence of her guest brought upon Yseulte, and which she herself was at once too young and too frank to dissemble. They amused the Princess Napraxine, and they gratified her infinitely. She had not the slightest pity for them; she had never suffered from any such awkwardness herself.

‘You are cruel, Princess,’ Melville ventured to murmur as he rose and bade her adieu.

‘Have you only now discovered that?’ said Nadine. ‘And I do not know why you should discover it especially now, or why, even if it were truth, you should be in any way astonished. Thirty years of the confessional should have taught you that women are always cruel. Are you never cruel?’ she said aloud, turning to Yseulte. ‘Ah, then, your dog will disobey you and your horse run away with you, my dear Countess!’

‘Is there no power in affection?’ said Yseulte bravely, feeling her colour come and go, and conscious that she had made an absurd reply.

Madame Napraxine smiled with a little look of indulgent amusement, which made the girl thrill to the tips of her fingers.

‘You are still in the age of illusions, my love. I dare say you even write poetry. Do you not write poetry? I am sure you must have a little velvet book and a silver pencil somewhere. It is so delightful to see anyone so young,’ she added, with seriousness, to Friederich Othmar. ‘The children are not young now, are never young. I do not think I ever was; I have no recollection of it. If I had daughters, I would send them to those Dames de Sainte Anne—away in Brittany, is it not?—if it be they who have made your nephew’s wife what she is. I did not believe there was any place left, simple enough and sweet and solemn enough to make a girlhood like a garden lily. Othmar has been very happy to have gathered the lily.’

There were both reality and admiration in many of her words, but the last phrase was not so sincere. Yseulte, overhearing, thought, with a pang, ‘She knows that he is not happy!’ Her heart swelled. She felt that this exquisite woman, so little her senior in actual years, so immeasurably her superior in knowledge, tact, and power, laughed at her even as she praised her. ‘How could she know that I wrote poetry?’ thought the child, conscious of many a poor little verse, the unseen, carefully-hidden, timid offspring of a heart too full, written with a pencil in the leafy recesses of the woods of Amyôt, in that instinctive longing for adequate expression which is born of a great love. The chance phrase gave Nadine Napraxine in her sight all the irresistible fascination of a magician. She felt as if those languid, luminous eyes could read all the secrets of her soul—secrets so innocent, all pregnant with the memory of Othmar—secrets pure, wholesome, and harmless as the violets that the mosses hid in the Valois woods of Amyôt.

‘Well, what do you think of her?’ asked Friederich Othmar when she had left the house. Yseulte hesitated.

‘I can believe that she has a great charm,’ she answered with some effort. ‘She has a fascination that one feels whether one will or no——’

She paused and unconsciously sighed.

‘She is the greatest charmeresse in Europe,’ replied Friederich Othmar. ‘No other words describe her. She is not a Cleopatra or a Mary Stuart. She would never have had an Actium or a Kirk’s Field. She would never have so blundered. She has no passions; she would be a better woman if she had. She is entirely chaste only because she is absolutely indifferent. It creates her immense power over men. She remains ice while she casts them into hell.’ He stopped abruptly, remembering to whom he spoke, and added, ‘Her visit was a most rare honour to you, my dear; she seldom deigns to go in person anywhere; her servants leave her cards, and the fortunate great ladies who are the recipients of them may go and see her on her day, and take their chance of receiving a few words from her. She is one of those exceptional women who have no intimate friends of their own sex, or hardly any; men——’

He paused, asked leave to light a cigarette, and walked with it awhile about the room. Yseulte did not take up his unfinished phrase by an interrogation.

‘Have you no inquisitiveness?’ thought Friederich Othmar. She was, indeed, full of restless and painful curiosity concerning the woman who had just left her presence, but she would not allow herself to utter a word of it. She thought it would be disloyalty to her husband.

Some fifteen minutes later Othmar himself entered.

‘Madame Napraxine has just honoured us in propriâ personâ,’ said the Baron, looking at him with intention.

‘Indeed!’ said Othmar. ‘It was most amiable of her,’ he added, after a moment’s pause; but to the penetration or to the imagination of his uncle it seemed that he spoke with embarrassment and annoyance. Yseulte had resumed her work at her tapestry. The cruel sense that she was not wanted there, that she had been brought there only out of pity, as a kind hand gives a stray animal a home, weighed on her more and more. She did not see all that others saw in her; all the attraction of her youth, and her innocence and her beauty. She had too sincere a humility for any idea of her own charms to console her. She was wise enough to perceive that the world flattered her because she was a rich man’s wife, but in her own eyes she remained the same that she had been under the grey shadows of Faïel.

‘If I were only myself again to-morrow, they would never think of me,’ she said to herself, with a wisdom born out of the poverty and obscurity in which her childish years had been spent. She was passionately grateful to Othmar, as well as devoted to him; but the suggestion that she was in no way necessary to his happiness, was even a burden and a constraint to him, had been harshly set before her by the words of Blanchette, and it was corroborated by a thousand trifles of look, and speech, and accident. His very entrance into her room had nothing of the warmth of a man who returns to what he loves; he came there so evidently because he felt that courtesy and custom required it of him.

The Baron understood what was passing in her thoughts as she bent her fair head over her tapestry-frame, the severity of her black velvet gown serving to enhance, by its contrast, the whiteness of her throat, the youthfulness of her features, the suppleness and vigour of her form. He longed to say to her, ‘My child, do not fret because he is no longer your lover—is even, perhaps, that of some one else; it is always so in marriage, even in love. There is always one who cares long, and one who cares little. It will not matter to you in the end; you will learn to lead your own life; you will have your children. I do not think you will have your lovers, as most of them do, but you will get reconciled to accepting life on a lower plane than your youthful imagination placed it on at first.’

He would have liked to say that, and much more, to her, but he did not venture. She made no confidence, no appeal for sympathy; and after all, for aught he knew, she might be entirely content with her husband’s ardour, or his lack of it. She was but a child still, and had little knowledge of the passions of men.

Othmar did not say that he had met his wife’s guest as she left his house.

She had given him her prettiest smile.

‘The Countess Othmar is quite lovely; and what a perfect manner!’ she had said. ‘What does she say to all your pessimism, to all your boutades? Does she understand them? You must send her to hear a course of Caro. Her mind can hardly be metaphysical yet. She is at the age to eat bonbons and expect caresses.’

Then she had made him a little careless sign of farewell, and her black horses had borne her through the great gates of gilded bronze of the house which always seemed to him oppressive as a gaol. The words were harmless, playful, amiable; yet they had annoyed him. He understood that she ridiculed his marriage, and that she divined that it had but little place in his affections, and as little hold upon his thoughts.

‘Poor child!’ he had said involuntarily, as he mounted his staircase to enter the presence of Yseulte.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

When Nadine Napraxine came into her boudoir on New Year’s day, she smiled a little to see it blocked with flowers. She had always discountenanced any other gifts than flowers. Whoever had presumed to offer her anything else would have run the risk of having his name struck off her list of acquaintances.

‘All those gros cadeaux are so vulgar,’ she was wont to say. ‘A branch of lilac—a tea-rose—nothing else. No; you must not send the lilac in a cloisonné Limoges vase, or the roses in a repoussé silver bowl; I should send you your vase or your bowl back to you; you have no kind of right to suppose that I want vases or bowls; but just the branch, just the rose, you may send if you like.’

They trembled, and dared not disobey; the lilacs or the roses came by the scores, with the greatest names of Europe attached to them; and her courtiers managed ingeniously to spend many thousands of francs by means of the rarest of the orchids, fulfilling her commands in the letter, though breaking them in the spirit.

She smiled now as she came into her favourite room this morning, when fog and frost together reigned without. All the orchid world was there to welcome her, brilliant and ethereal as the hues of sunrise.

‘They love to be extravagant,’ she thought, with a little contempt. ‘If one limit them to flowers they manage to spend as much as if they bought jewels. It is very vulgar, all that sort of thing. If I cared for any one of them, I think I should like him to bring me a little bunch of corn-cockles—just by way of change.’

She glanced here and there at a name, but, for the most part, did not even trouble herself to look who was the sender of this or of that.

‘C’est toute la bande!’ she murmured, with an impatient amusement, knowing that every man in Paris, with rank sufficient to be able to dare to do so, had sent his floral tribute there.

She rang for her favourite servant Paul; when he appeared she said to him, ‘Take all those cards off those baskets and bouquets; they look as if they were ticketed for a horticultural show.’ So Paul, obedient, swept away the visiting cards with his swift and silent touch, and the senders of them were not even honoured by her caring to know their names; their gifts were all blended in one mass of blossom as indifferent to her as themselves.

Paul, as he retired with the cards crushed in his hand, thought to himself with grim amusement, ‘If only those beaux messieurs would understand that Nadège Fedorowna cares no more for any one of them than she will care for those flowers when they are yellow and withered to-morrow.’

‘If somebody would bring me the corn-cockles!’ she herself thought, with a little laugh.

At that moment there came a timid tap on the door which separated her boudoir from the great salons. She recognised it with a little shiver, such as a nervous woman will give when she sees an unpleasant or uncouth animal; only she was not nervous herself; she was merely impressionable and irritated.

‘Come in,’ she said impatiently.

The door opened behind the satin hangings, and Platon Napraxine entered.

‘How many times must I request you to pay me the common respect of sending to know if I be visible?’ she said, with that hauteur which he dreaded, as a prisoner in the fortress of Peter and Paul dreads the sight of the knout.

‘I beg your pardon,’ he murmured humbly. ‘It is not our day, but I thought you would allow me to take advantage of the French New Year to—to—to bring you a little gift. Do not be angry, Nadine——’

He spoke very submissively and with a timidity which made his high-coloured cheeks grow paler. He had for many a year abandoned all hope of being any nearer to the woman who was his wife than the marble of the steps which she descended to her carriage; yet he could not help having, every now and then, a foolish impulse to approach her in affection, a wistful fancy that perhaps—perhaps—at last——

He laid on her knee as he spoke a velvet case, with her crown and initials in gold upon it.

‘My dear Platon, what nonsense!’ she said, with some real annoyance, and she murmured to herself: ‘In half an hour he will take something similar to half a dozen cocottes!’

But she could do no less than open the case, which was filled by a necklace, earrings, and a small crown for the hair in pink pearls.

Platon Napraxine watched her wistfully as she looked at them with a listless indifference. If he could only please her once! If he could only once see that beautiful contemptuous mouth smile kindly on him.

‘There is not one of them worth her little finger,’ he thought, meaning the companions and consolers of his life.

‘I think you have no pink pearls; it is the only thing you have not,’ he said; as humble still as a chidden dog. ‘Will you not let me wish you bonne fête, Nadine? I——’

He took her hand and carried it to his lips. She drew it away, not angrily, but with a profound indifference.

‘I cannot see why one day in the year is any more than another, that we should make speeches upon it,’ she said, shutting up the jewel case. ‘The pearls are quite charming. It is too good of you. Only, you know I do not in the least see why you should give me things; I really do not want them——’

It was the ‘j’en ai tant’ of her five-year-old philosophy.

‘I know you do not want them,’ said her husband with a blank sense of foolish disappointment, foolish because his hope had been foolish. ‘But still most women never have jewels enough. I do not mean that I ever thought you would care for them, but still it is the custom—and—one never likes the day to go by,—if you would say a kind word——’

‘My dear Platon,’ she said wearily, yet with a certain amusement at his stupidity, ‘why will you persist in that superstition that one day is any more than all the others?—and not even a Russian day either! You, who are such a Slavophil, should have ignored a French New Year’s day as quite pagan and indecent. The pearls are very pretty; I will put them on to-night, if that will please you. Only—only—you know I am not very fond of that sort of presents. Are you sure you have not another similar case in your pocket that you are going to take this morning to that very handsome new house in the Avenue Villiers? All the houses are new there, but that is newest——’

Napraxine coloured dully with a dual sense of embarrassment and ridicule.

He was silent.

‘Are you sure?’ said his wife, with her head leaning back on her cushions and her demure smile gleaming beneath the lashes of her half-closed eyelids.

‘Nadine!’ stammered Napraxine, in mingled discomfiture and eagerness, which made him blunder more and more. ‘What can one do when you—you,—as God is above us, if you had not turned me adrift years ago as if I were a monster, I would never have looked at another woman. You do not believe it, but I would not. Even now, I would leave them all if you said a word,—if—if——’

She rose and laid the case of pearls down on a table near her.

‘My dear Prince,’ she said in her iciest tones, though, in her own heart, she could very willingly have laughed aloud, ‘I see you have indeed mistaken your road to the Avenue de Villiers. Do you think you can purchase my—kindness—as you do that of your mistresses? Pray let this be the last of such blunders. You have not been guilty of them for many years. Do not begin now. They offend me. You will only ruffle, very disagreeably and uselessly, the amiable understanding on which we have agreed to live.’

‘When did I ever agree?’

His face was darkly flushed, his voice was husky and had a tremor in it, something savage and imperious began to wake in him and tell him that after all this delicate and disdainful woman was his;—but her languid lids opened wholly, and her calm, luminous eyes looked him full in the face with that look with which the keeper can daunt, by sheer power of will, the animal which could trample him into dust and tear him into atoms.

‘Pray, do not let us re-open a discussion which has been closed for six years,’ she said in her softest, coldest voice. ‘I am quite sure you meant well; I never bear malice; I will wear your pearls to-night. We have a dinner, I think; for d’Aumale, is it not? Bonne fête, mon ami. Think what a troubled life you would have if I cared about that new house, and be grateful. Please send Paul here. He must take away some of this lilac. So much of it will give me migraine.’

Napraxine stifled as best he could some oath which he dared not utter aloud, and went slowly and sullenly out of her presence, sensible of an ignominious dismissal. His glance as he went dwelt with suspicion on the baskets and bouquets which made the room and the adjoining rooms gardens of orchids and odontoglossum, of gardenias and of tea-roses.

‘Is there one among them,’ he thought, ‘for whom she cares?’

He was nothing to her: but he would be something to such an one if ever he could find his foe.

He was hurt, wounded, humiliated, infuriated, all in one; conscious of a defeat which made him grotesque in her sight, sensible of an act of unwisdom and of sentimentality which had only placed him lower than ever in the estimation of a woman whom he was furiously conscious that he still loved and still desired.

When the hangings of the door had closed behind him, his wife laughed with an amusement which her sense of courtesy had controlled before, and put a tea-rose in the bosom of her gown.

‘How stupid, how intensely stupid, to come to me as he goes to his cocottes,’ she thought, with that irritation and ennui which were the only emotions which he ever aroused in her. ‘And to renew that sort of argument as if we were two greengrocers living at Montmartre! Decidedly, when the bon Dieu made poor Platon, he left out of his composition every vestige of tact; and really tact is the only quality that it is absolutely necessary for everybody to have to prevent them from irritating others. Who could have imagined that after six years he would begin again like that!—he has always a little access of tenderness at the end of the year; last time he gave me a dreadful Chinese idol as big as himself with green eyes; some dealer had told him it was very precious: he did not know, he never knows; I wonder if there were anybody so stupid in all the world; I am only astonished that he did not send for Sachs and Mitz as an agreeable surprise for me!’

‘Yes, Paul,’ she said aloud, ‘take away most of those flowers, they make my head ache; and give that case to Jeanne to put up in the jewel-safe. Tell Fedor that I shall want the horses in an hour.’

‘How very stupid some women must be,’ she reflected often, ‘to let themselves be dictated to, and denied, and bullied, and worried by their husbands. Nothing is so easy to manage as a man, if you only begin in the right way with him. All depends on how you begin; it is just like a horse; if you do not make him feel that you are his superior at once, he will take advantage of you for ever. I remember my mother saying to me before my marriage: “Ménage ton mari, sois bien douce.” Now, if I had listened to her, I should have had Platon on my shoulders all my life; I dare say, even, he would have expected me to please him, and to listen to him, and to accept all his absurdities. But I froze him from the first; he has always been intensely afraid of me. Of two people there is always one who is afraid, and I preferred that it should be he. It just shows what mind can do over matter.’

She looked listlessly at a pile of telegrams which her servant had brought in with him and laid on the little table near her.

‘They will all say the same thing,’ she thought indifferently, as she opened two or three which contained the usual greetings of the New Year from her innumerable relatives and friends in other countries and at other courts; no Russian, of course, amongst them.

‘If people must have it that a year begins, which is utterly absurd, why did they not take pretty pink and white April instead of this ugly, shivering, frost-bitten January?’ she said to her dog Dauphin, as she glanced through the tedious compliments of the telegrams. At last, amidst them, there was one which made her change colour as she read it. It was from Lady Brancepeth, away on her estates in the north of England. It was only a line; it said:

‘My brother has been killed on the ice in the Gulf of S. Lawrence.’

There were no details, only the bare fact, as it had been brought with the same crushing curtness by the electric cable from the western to the eastern shores of the Atlantic.

Nadine Napraxine read it three times without at the first realising or believing it. The news gave her a shock; not a great one, but still a kind of chilly pain and vague terror. A mist swam for a moment before her eyes; a sorrow, which was quite sincere, moved her as the sense of what she read gradually grew more and more distinct. A sudden remembrance smote her of Geraldine, as she had seen him first some three years earlier, standing on the beach at Biarritz, clad in his blue sea-clothes, with the sun shining full on his fair frank features and in his clear, happy, candid eyes. He had looked at her; his sister had beckoned to him, and had said carelessly: ‘Ralph, is it possible that you do not know Madame Napraxine?’ and he had come up to them over the rough red rocks, the sun and the wind playing in his bright hair. And then, life had never again been quite the same to him, and now it was over for ever. He was dead, just thirty years old!

‘Pauvre garçon!’ she said, with genuine regret, as she had said the same words when they had told her that the young Louis Napoléon had been killed at Isandula. It was not the regret for which the dead man, thinking of her as the frozen night had closed in on him and over the wastes of ice-bound waters, perchance had hoped. ‘Pauvre garçon!’ she murmured where she sat, amidst the profusion of the flowers. For the moment she felt cold in her room, which was as warm as a summer day, and through whose double windows of opalescent glass no breath of the outer air could penetrate.

‘I suppose they will say I did this too!’ she thought with impatience, her memory reverting to the death of young Seliedoff even whilst she said again very softly to herself, ‘Pauvre garçon!’

She was sincerely sorry; she felt nothing of that more passionate and personal pain which once Geraldine might not unnaturally have hoped that his death would excite in her, but a sincere regret mingled with a kind of annoyance that men who had loved her would always go and run some tragic risks, so that they perished miserably:—and then the world blamed her.

‘I, who detest tragedies!’ she said to the little dog. ‘When the majority of men, too, always live too long, live to have gout, and use spectacles, and grow tiresome!’

‘Pauvre garçon, pauvre garçon!’ she murmured once more, in the only threnody which occurred to her: how could he go and get drowned in the S. Lawrence, where the ice was surely as thick as in the Neva? She had always liked to play at being Providence to her world, a very capricious and unkind Providence indeed, but still one which decided their destinies without any reference to their desires as Providence is always permitted to do. She did not like these rude gusts of uncalled for accident which blew out the lives which she held in her hand as if they were so many tapers!

‘Pauvre garçon!’

He had grown very wearisome, he had been even disposed to become exacting, he had wearied her, and she had not known very well how to get rid of him; but still it was a pity. He had had a great position, he was an only son, his own people were very fond of him, he was better than most of the men of his age and rank; she had for once the sensation that one feels when one has broken a rare piece of china,—the sensation of having done a silly thing, an irreparable thing.

‘I never told him to go to Canada!’ she said to herself. No: she had only told him that he wearied her. So he had wearied her; he had never been too amusing at the best of times. It was not her fault that he had become tiresome; they all became so; they had no originality. Still it was a pity; she saw his fair frank face, with its eyes so blue and so wistful, looking at her as he had stood to hear his sentence that last day we saw La Jacquemerille.

‘I do not think I said anything unkind to him that day,’ she reflected; and then the little smile that was so often on her lips came on them a moment as she thought: ‘To be sure, I told him to marry somebody—anybody.’

Well, he was dead, and before he was thirty; with all his courage and gallantry and wealth, and the many people who loved him at home all powerless to save him from the black chasm of the yawning ice; and she was not so very sorry after all; she honestly wished she could feel more sorrow. She had never known real sorrow but once, when her father had been found dead in his writing-room in the Embassy at Vienna.

‘Platon will be more sorry,’ she thought, ‘he always likes his worst enemies so much!’

Then she rang again for Paul, and told him to take the telegram to the Prince if he was still in the house.

Napraxine, in five minutes’ time, not venturing to return in person, wrote to her on the back of the printed message:

‘I am grieved indeed. Would you desire to postpone the dinner of to-night?’

She wrote back to him:

‘That would be too infinitely ridiculous; though it is certainly a great pity, he was no relation of ours, only a bonne connaissance!’

‘A bonne connaissance!’ exclaimed Napraxine when he read the pencilled words. That was all the requiem given to the drowned man, whose battered and disfigured body was then on its way homeward, on the deck of a vessel which was ploughing a stormy way through dusky mountainous Atlantic waves!

She sat still a little while, looking through the remaining telegrams and casting them aside; all the rest were the mere congratulations of the season.

‘I wonder when people will invent anything new!’ she thought as she threw the last aside. ‘To think that the Romans five and twenty centuries ago were also running about and visiting and sending cakes and taking flowers, because what they called a new year had come! I suppose the world will never liberate itself from the camisole de force of idiotic customs.’

She wrote a telegram of sympathy to the sister of Geraldine as she had written a letter of condolence to the mother of Seliedoff; then she had herself wrapped in sealskin from head to foot and prepared for her drive in the Bois.

‘When I am gone, open the windows, Paul,’ she said to the servant, who was so astonished that he ventured to ask if he heard aright, knowing that his lady loved warm air as a palm does.

‘Open the windows and leave them open,’ she repeated. She looked at all the hot-house blossoms and thought, with that cruelty which was latent in her side by side with her higher qualities, ‘They will all be withered in an hour. Paul will tell all the valets, they will tell all their masters——’

The fancy diverted her. She liked flowers, but she liked a little cruelty like this much better. It would be wholesome for all those men to know how she valued their New Year’s gifts.

‘Women nowadays make them so vain,’ she said to herself. ‘If it were not for me, they would never get a lesson at all.’

To some the lesson had been severe, severe as the severity of death; but that fact scarcely affected her conscience.

She did not stop her carriage to speak to any of her acquaintances, for she supposed that the news of Geraldine’s death would by this time be known in Paris, where he had so many friends, and knew that everyone would take pleasure in saying to her—‘Mais comment donc? Est-ce bien vrai?—’ It would be so tiresome!

‘I cannot help it if they kill themselves!’ she said to herself as her horses sped along the frosty roads. ‘Society will blame me now, but I imagine they would have blamed me much more if I had gone away into his north-country mists with poor Geraldine as he would have liked me to do; he was so sensational, poor fellow, and so romantic under his English awkwardness. Englishmen are like that; they can seldom say anything they mean properly, but they are very romantic under it all; they are always ready to compromise themselves, despite their decorum, and they have just the dogged fidelity of their own bulldogs.’

He had been better than most of them certainly.

She felt a certain pain as she went through the chill sharp air and heavy mists, and remembered how many times she had seen Geraldine come riding through the trees, and how boyishly his face had flushed whenever he had seen her first! Poor foolish fellow! to leave all his possessions and interests and duties, and to go out to Ottawa, where he had no earthly business to be, as if going to Ottawa were likely to deliver him of her memory! That was so truly an Englishman’s idea, to change latitude and longitude and think you left behind you any inconvenient passion you might be haunted with by merely changing your climate and your food! ‘Poor Ralph! Poor Ralph! I think there was nothing on earth tragic, ridiculous, or abominable that he would not have done if I had ordered him to do it—except that he would never have killed Platon. I do not think even I could have made him kill Platon. That is the sort of scruple an Englishman always has, alone of all men in the world.’

‘I suppose she knows it, but she does not care,’ said many persons, looking after her as their wont was, as she flashed past them, nothing scarcely seen of her except her luminous eyes looking out from the brown lustre of the sealskins, whilst she made an almost imperceptible gesture of her head to the innumerable salutations that marked her course.

‘When we get rid of the camisole de force,’ she said to herself, ‘we shall get rid of bowing to each other; it is insane, when everyone meets everyone else morning, noon, and night, to be obliged to jerk one’s head fifty times every quarter of an hour when one is out of doors!’

She scarcely moved hers, indeed, but still it was a trouble; it was to avoid the trouble that she sometimes took those long solitary drives into the open country, of which the motive constantly perplexed her world. To any other woman they would have attributed assignations, but no one could ever do that to the Princess Napraxine; her absolute indifference was too notorious a fact, and the dullest who knew aught of her felt that if ever she awoke to any preference she would never stoop to mask it. She cared nothing for the opinion of any living being. She had no lover, only because she had no love.

Under her nonchalance and her occasional sentiments of sympathy with revolutionists, she was of an inexorably proud temperament; she would have liked to be an empress,—an empress such as was seen in earlier times, whose mere breath spoke the fiat of life and death. As it was, she could only vex the souls of men and kill orchids.

When she reached home, after driving until dusk, she passed through her boudoir to see if Paul had obeyed her. He had obeyed her implicitly: the windows were still wide open and the bitter biting air was streaming into the room, driving out before it all the heat from the calorifère; all the poor flowers were withered, as if a scorch from fire had passed over them, and the beautiful butterfly petals were mere shrivelled, shapeless leaves. It had been a pity, she thought, to have obeyed her so exactly; yet she knew very well that if he had not done so, Paul, despite his twenty-five years of service to the house of Napraxine, would have found himself outside her doors for evermore that night.

‘Shut them now,’ she said to him, as he waited for her commands, ‘and take away all those baskets and bouquets.’

Paul knew her too well to dare to remark what he had thought all the afternoon, that it had been a sad waste of some fifty thousand francs’ worth of blossoms. He closed the windows in silence. She passed on towards her dressing-chambers through the little library which divided the boudoir from them, the gayest and most coquettish of little libraries in appearance, with ivory bookcases ornamented by painted medallions of birds, a few white marble busts, and hangings of modern Gobelin tapestry; but a library by no means destitute of serious and philosophic works of some Latin authors, and of transactions of recent scientific research.

In the library, Paul, hesitating, ventured to approach her with a bouquet which was not harmed by the twilight frost.

‘This was left a few moments ago,’ he explained as he tendered it in some trepidation, uncertain whether he had done wrong to exclude it from the general massacre. She took it indifferently: it was very simple;—a bouquet of narcissus with a rim of white violets, nothing else. The name on the card with it was Othmar’s. She smiled and took it with her into her dressing-room. It was the bunch of ‘corn-cockles’ for which she had wished.

‘I did not do wrong,’ thought Paul, with a sigh of relief. Then he smiled too as he recalled the winter in which the sender had been many times alone with his mistress in that little room where the orchids had now withered in their gilded baskets. ‘It was he if it were ever anyone,’ he thought; ‘but I do not believe it has ever been anyone—yet.’

His knowledge of the world made him make the restriction, as he called one of his subordinates to sweep away all that rubbish, pointing to the poor murdered flowers, whose costly corbeilles would be one of his many perquisites.

She, meanwhile, was undressed, clothed in a loose gown of embroidered china silk, took a cup of tea, and slept peacefully in the perfumed warmth. She liked to come out of the frosty and foggy air, and lie still with the pleasant drowsiness caused by the contrast of the sharp evening wind and the atmosphere heated to 40° Réaumur. Physicians told her that so sudden a change was not wise or safe, but she laughed at them. ‘What is pleasant is always wholesome,’ she said, constructing new rules of hygiene, as she often did new rules of etiquette. She liked the warmth, the sense of repose, of languor, of voluptuousness, as a cat loves it, stretched on velvet, in still hot air. She slept now with perfect composure, dreamlessly, from the semi-stupor that driving against cold winds brings with it afterwards. Then, all at once, she dreamt of a lake half frozen, of dark tempestuous skies, of an open grave in the black water under the jagged drifting ice; and she awoke with a little unconscious cry to open her eyes on the mellow light, the satin hangings, the Saxe mirrors, the snowy bear-skins of her dressing-room, the little tray of silver and china, the bouquet of narcissus and violets near her.

‘What a wretched dream! I, who never dream,’ she said impatiently, as she stretched her limbs out on the white furs of her couch. Then she remembered Geraldine.

‘Will he haunt me every time I go to sleep?’ she thought, with a little shiver. It seemed to her altogether unreasonable and undeserved. She had never told him to go on the Gulf of S. Lawrence in the dangerous season before the ice was solid.

In an hour’s time she took the bouquet of narcissus in her hand, and descended to her drawing-rooms. She wore the pink pearls that night, the little crown holding up her hair, raised like that of the portraits of Madame Tallien: she never wore her hair twice together in the same fashion. ‘If you always wear your hair the same way, you have no imagination, and you are always suspected of a peruke,’ she was wont to say.

Platon Napraxine seeing his despised gift thus honoured, was almost contented. In the régime of starvation, on which he had been kept so long, the smallest crumbs of condescension were eagerly seized by him.

She herself was in a gentle and gracious mood; she was not quite so merciless in speech as usual, but she was quite as charming. The Duc d’Aumale sat on her right hand, the English Ambassador on her left. Her airy laughter rang ever and again like silver bells; and Napraxine, even in the midst of the surprised gratitude with which he saw his pink pearls honoured by being worn, thought with a sense of depression and wonder: ‘If I were to die to-morrow, would she care a whit more than she cares now for Ralph?’

CHAPTER XXXIX.

The telegram had merely said that Geraldine had been killed on the ice in the Gulf of S. Lawrence. There had been no details; but later on all the world learned that death had come to him in the freshness of his manhood by one of those trite accidents so common in North American waters in the beginning of winter, when the ice is still loose and detached, and is borne to and fro by the sullen waves which seem unwilling to endure its chains. He had been standing on an ice floe, off the Prince Edward Island, with Canadian hunters, seeking seals, when that portion of it which sustained them had suddenly broken away before they were aware of their danger, and, drifting with frightful rapidity, had borne them out to sea at the close of the short, bitter winter’s day. Many on the shore were witnesses of the certain death to which they were carried, but no help was possible before the darkness of night came down,—the night which froze all human life left without shelter in it.

Where the floe went none knew; when the dawn broke there was no trace of its passage to be made out amidst the many masses of ice rocking, meeting, parting, crashing one upon another as the frost strove to bind beneath its iron hold the free will and the wild anger of the sea. Whether those who had been upon it had been drowned, or frozen to death, or borne out to mid-Atlantic, none could know; but on the third day the body of Geraldine and of two of the Canadian fishermen had been washed ashore off the New Brunswick coast: his features had been recognised by his own crew, and the tidings of his cruel fate had been sent to his mother and his sisters. He had been the only son of a high and honourable House. There was the grief which sorrowed without hope in the old north country halls, where a widowed mother wept for him, and a loyal and loving tenantry followed his body to its grave by the fair Yore waters.

One Tuesday evening, some two weeks later, when Nadine Napraxine returned home from the opera to change her gown for a ball at Prince Orloff’s, there lay on her dressing-room table, amongst others, a letter of which the superscription was very familiar to her, and which moved her with a certain sense which was as nearly fear as it was possible for her temperament to know.

She herself had written to Geraldine’s people, but no one of them had answered her until now that Evelyn Brancepeth did so. She broke the envelope and read the letter, standing in the costume of Venetian red embroidered with silver flowers, in which, at the opera that night, she had held all the eyes of the house upon her as she sat, careless, indifferent, half hidden behind her great red fan, the diamond butterflies which served in the place of sleeves trembling upon her shoulders.

‘I know very well,’ wrote Lady Brancepeth, ‘that before the world you are wholly blameless. I know that my unhappy brother had no right to consider himself preferred by you. I know, were I speaking with you now, you would say with your chilliest manner that you had never honoured him with any encouragement to folly. But you will pardon me if I say that you are more blamable to me than you would be if you had loved him. I am a plain, stupid, unromantic Englishwoman, but even I can see that love excuses its own excesses: l’amour prime le droit. I could pardon a great passion if it even committed a great crime. But you have no passion, you have even no sentiment. You are sometimes amused, and you are sometimes—much more often—bored; and there the scale of your emotions rounds itself and ends. There may be someone who can, or who will, extend for you that narrow circle, though I very greatly doubt it; but it was entirely certain that poor Ralph had never any chance or any power to do so. He adored you, quite stupidly and hopelessly, but he never even knew how to say so in such a manner as could have touched you. He was very English, very terre à terre, and if he had never seen you he would have led a happy life enough; a commonplace one, no doubt, but one useful in his generation, and content with those simple joys which to a raffinée like you seem so absurd and so dull. But he did meet you; and ever afterwards life meant nothing to him unless it meant your presence, and your will. You had admitted him into the honour of a certain intimacy, which, in his blundering English way, he fancied meant all kinds of eventualities that it did not mean. No doubt his delusion was of his own creating, and of course he ought to have been prepared for his dismissal when he had become troublesome or tedious; but he was so unwise that he put all his heart into that which he should have understood was a mere jeu de salon; and you did not condescend to give him any warning. Why should you? you will say. Why, indeed, since his fate was as entirely indifferent to you as the bouquets that crowd your antechambers in Carnaval. It would have been so very easy for you, when first my brother ventured to show you what he felt, to banish him for ever with a decisive word; he would have been man enough to understand and to accept it; but you did not take that trouble, and the love of you grew—not perhaps precisely upon hope—but at least upon the tacit permission to exist. I scarcely know why I write all this to you, for you will not read it; only I have been your friend, so far as you allow any woman to call herself so, and I feel that whenever we meet in the world you will expect me to be so still, and I cannot. I must ask you to let us be strangers. No doubt, actually, you are innocent of my brother’s death, but indirectly—even in a manner directly—you were the cause of it. You made his country, his family, his home life, his duties of all kinds, become no more to him than if he had never known land or kindred. The pain with which you filled him made him wander in an aimless unrest from place to place in an alien world with which he had no sympathy, and made him only too willing to die, that he might so throw off the fever of your memory. My dear Nadine, you are a woman of perfect honour, of high repute, of sensitive and unbending pride, and on the ermine of your delicate dignity there is no stain as yet. But for me, there is blood upon your hand. I can never take it in my own again. Let us be strangers.’

The letter was signed, and nothing more was added to it.

Nadine Napraxine read the lines through, word by word, and when she had done so, folded it up and put it aside, without irritation, but not altogether without regret. The frank, sincere, and at times rough words of Geraldine’s sister had been welcome to her by their contrast with the false sweetness of the world’s phrases, and she knew that she would lose her friendship with reluctance, and miss her surly honesty, with its uncompromising truths. But the letter seemed to her exaggerated, not in the best taste, even if, under the circumstances which inspired it, natural enough. Geraldine had perished by such an accident as every year costs scores of fishers’ lives whenever the ice floes meet and sever in the half-frozen seas of the north. Why would they see her hand in it so clearly?

‘It is just as they always see the finger of God where a horse stumbles at a post and rails, or when a pointsman is sleepy and does not hang out the red light,’ she said to herself, with some impatient contempt. ‘I am sorry, quite sorry myself, that he is dead, but I certainly never told him to get upon a block of ice in midwinter on the St. Lawrence. And it was quite as much Platon’s doing as mine that ever he took the habit of coming about our house at all. Besides, if he had not been very stupid, as even his sister says, he would have understood à demi-mot; there is nothing on earth so tiresome as people who want things explained.’

Still, there were passages in the letter which touched her conscience, and reached that truthfulness in self-judgment which easily awoke in her.

‘I suppose I am unkind—sometimes,’ she thought, with a certain contrition. ‘When they irritate me I really do not care what becomes of them. As long as they know how to please me I am always amiable. It is not my fault that their knowledge comes to an end too soon. It is their own poverty of style, of thought, of invention. If I were writing a dictionary, and had to define Man, I should say he was a limited animal, exceedingly limited. There is infinitely more variety about dogs.’

The very recollection of the excessive monotony of the human species made her yawn. She wondered if that monotony were the fault of civilisation; probably not. In a savage state, no doubt, instincts had been all alike, just as manners were all alike now. People were all dull, and because she found them so they considered her heartless. Poor Geraldine had been dull; dull in comprehension, in intention, in discernment; and just because she had found him so his sister wrote to her as if she were a murderess.

‘Poor woman!’ she reflected. ‘She is always so disposed to see everything so terribly en noir. That is so English, too. They always have the fog in their eyes. I am not in the least like Lady Macbeth. I neither murder men, nor have my sleep murdered by them. It is natural that she should feel keenly the loss of her only brother, but it is absurd that she should lay the blame upon my shoulders, when she knows that if he had not wished to shoot seals—which is a barbarous pastime—he would most probably be alive now. As if a man could be wasting with despair, and yet care about seals! To be sure, it is very English. If an Englishman be hopelessly in love with any one, he generally goes a long way off and tries to kill a tiger or a moose. I do not see the connection of ideas between the sigh of passion and the steel of a gun barrel, but there must be some link of affinity for them, because they all do it. I prefer men like Othmar, who kill other men.’

Although she was all alone as these thoughts drifted through her mind while the letter of Lady Brancepeth lay amongst the litter of notes, cards, and invitations on her table, a momentary warmth came on her face as the name of Othmar recurred to her, and a certain bitterness of contempt came into her recollection as she remembered his marriage. If he had had patience, if he only had had patience, perhaps—perhaps—perhaps——

She would not have gone away with him, because in her world they did not do those things, and she would have always been too keenly afraid of an after-time of regret and weariness, but she might have accepted the gift of his life, and given him something of her own.

In his haste and wrath he had set up a barrier between them, but how frail it was! Only the timid, wistful youth of a girl! The imperial scorn of the Cleopatras of the earth rose in her before her meek, childlike rival.

What a coward he had been to shelter himself behind the frail rampart of a young girl’s affection; affection which he did not appreciate, did not reciprocate, did not value!

A woman with a tithe part of the discernment and the experience which she possessed could cast the horoscope of Yseulte without any recourse to the stars for knowledge of the future. All that fresh and tender love would count for nothing, would avail nothing, would awaken no response. She would bear his children, and live in his houses, and be the object of all his careful outward observance, and that would be all. He would grow unspeakably weary of seeing her, of hearing her, of remembering her tie to him, and he would conceal his weariness ill or well, and be every day more and more galled by the necessity for concealment.

When Nadine Napraxine, after the ball, went to her own rooms that night, she had herself undressed by her women and wrapped in a loose bed-room gown, made of her favourite white satin, and lined with eider-down. She dismissed her women, and lay before the warmth of her dressing-room fire in that dreamy state between waking and sleeping which is the very perfection of repose. The softly-lighted chambers opened one out of another in a vista of rich subdued colour, ending in the bath room, where a lamp hung above a beautiful reproduction of the Venus of Naples. The rooms were so many temples to her own perfections, she was the Grace, the Muse, and the Venus herself of this perfect sanctuary, which no footfall of man had ever dared invade. As she reclined before the fire that night and glanced through her half-closed lids down the succession of chambers, which in the clear but delicate light had the glow of jewels, she thought how dull and empty they would have seemed to most women of her years without a lover’s step coming silently and swiftly through the fragrant silence.

‘Decidedly,’ she mused, ‘the voix de la nature says nothing at all to me. Is it because I have no heart, as they say? I do not think the heart has much to do with that kind of thing. I suppose I am cold, as they all cry out against me. Of all of them, there is no one I should care to see coming through those shadows; he would disturb me. The passions are coarse things. It is disgusting that there should not be two ways of love, one for Dona Sol and one for Manon Lescaut—for one’s self and one’s maid. But there are not. On se rend, ou on ne se rend pas; but when the submission is made Nature makes no difference between Cleopatra and a camp-follower.’

She sighed a little, inconsistently. She disdained alike the solicitations of the senses and the pleasures of the affections, and yet she was conscious of a certain coldness and emptiness in her life; she was not prepared to confess that what she needed was love, but a vague impression of solitude came upon her. She remembered the lips of Othmar pressed upon her wrist, how they had burned, how they had trembled!

Was it possible that the keenest joys of life lay, after all, in those follies which her temperament and her philosophies had classed with contempt amongst the excesses of wantons and the exaggerations of poets?

The purest maiden in her cloister could not have been colder than was Nadine Napraxine; to her the indulgence of the senses only meant an intolerable humiliation, an ignominious outrage; maternity itself had only been to her a long and hated and revolting burden, a sign of unendurable degradation, which offended all her pride and all her delicacy. The satyr had always seemed to her a much juster emblem of such instincts than any winged amorino.

‘D’un être inconnu le contact passager’

could not rouse any desire or any sentiment in her.

And yet there were occasionally moments, fleeting ones it is true, when in the sublimated egoism of her indolent, ironical, artificial life, she had a vague impression of some possible passion which yet might arouse her to acknowledge its force; a tempestuous fancy swept over her, as a storm-wind may sweep over a parterre of tulips and azaleas, for stronger emotions, hotter enmities, dearer attachments, keener strife, than those which the polished inanities of her own sphere could yield to her. The emotion lasted with her very little time, but whilst it was there the eyes of Othmar always looked in memory into hers.

She who at will forgot everything had never forgotten the sound of his voice as he had pleaded with her. It had ever since haunted her with a vague imperfect sense of something missed, something lost, something in her own life incomplete and unattainable. She had not a doubt but that in time they would have wearied each other—fatigue was the inevitable shadow of all love—yet she had a pathetic regretfulness as for life incomplete, undeveloped, unshared, whenever she remembered that hers and his might have been passed together.

It had been only a sentiment; it never had risen to the form of desire, or ached with the pain of passion; but it had been a sentiment, vague, almost poetic; a wild flower of feeling which seemed of strange growth in the hot-house culture of her intelligence, and the rarified chill air of her many philosophies.

She had sometimes said to herself, ‘I could have loved him.’ In self-communion the conditional mood is never parted by more than a hair’s breadth from the present. There were moments in the ironical, indolent, artificial life which usurped her time and thoughts in which she almost regretted that decision which had banished Othmar from her side and given him to another. The regret was as nearly a movement of the heart as she was capable of; but it was much besides that; it was the inquisitiveness of a désœuvrée incredulous that life could hold any great emotions for her; it was the impulse of a contemptuous courage to break through social laws which it despised; it was the desire of a woman lonely amidst her triumphs to find that key to the enjoyment of existence which, in some way or another, had slipped through her hands, and had never been discovered in its hiding-place.

‘If I had been quite sure that he would have contented me!’ she thought more than once.

If she had been quite sure, she would have surrendered everything, paused at nothing; it was neither daring nor generosity which were wanting in her; but she had not been sure, since she was never sure of herself!

CHAPTER XL.

A fortnight afterwards, the Prince and Princess Napraxine issued cards for a dinner, to meet the Emperor of all the Russias. The invitation came to the Hôtel Othmar at noon, as Yseulte sat at breakfast; she coloured a little as she saw it, and passed it across the table to her husband with a dozen other invitations. He glanced at them, put them aside, and spoke of something else. She hesitated a few minutes, then said timidly:

‘Am I to accept it?’

‘Accept which of them?’

‘The Princess Napraxine’s.’

He looked up with some displeasure at her tone; he answered quickly:

‘Assuredly. Why not? You cannot leave it open as you do for a ball or a reception.’

She did not venture to say why. She coloured more and more, and remained silent.

‘You have no plea for refusing invitations since you are not ill and are seen everywhere,’ he said coldly. ‘Besides, I thought you were acquiring the tastes of the world.’

She did not speak. She could not say to him: ‘I cannot bear to be the guest of Madame Napraxine, because they tell me you have loved her as you never have loved me.’

Othmar glanced at her, and imagined what was in her thoughts. ‘Perhaps that meddlesome Melville has talked to her,’ he thought, with the ready suspicion of a man of the world of an ecclesiastic. He said, a little impatiently:

‘My dear child, do not conceive animosities against people, or you will spoil your own sweetness of temper and make yourself disliked by your own sex. And do not fret yourself with imaginary antagonisms, which are altogether unworthy of you. When we are living in the world, we must abide by its rules of courtesy. I am wholly at a loss to imagine why you should be unwilling to accept this invitation; but as you are seen everywhere in this your first Paris winter, you cannot without rudeness refuse it. This is the only good that I have ever seen come out of society, that it compels us to subordinate our own inclinations to certain definite laws of good breeding. Pray do not grow fretful; it was your beautiful serenity that I first admired, and loved.’

He hesitated a moment before the last word.

‘I will remember,’ she said gently; but without much effort she would have burst into tears.

He saw the effort, and it irritated him. He knew that he ought to have said to her, ‘Follow your inclination and refuse, if you like.’ But her wish to refuse it had annoyed him, and hurried him into a command to accept it from which he could not recede. And the charm of Nadine Napraxine was upon him, and had broken down all his wiser resolutions.

He looked across the table at Yseulte. She was as fair as the dawn, certainly; but she had no power over him; she did not beguile his time, or stimulate his wit, or stir his intellect; she did not, even after twelve months of possession, move his senses. She was a lovely child, most obedient, tender, and spiritual; but—she was not the mistress of his thoughts. She never had been, she never would be so.

‘How stupid men are!’ thought Nadine Napraxine that night. ‘She is worth very much more than I am; she is both handsome and lovely; she is as harmless and guileless as a dove, and she adores him, a great deal too much; yet, perhaps one ought to say therefore, he cares nothing on earth for her; he will love me as long as his life lasts; he would do so even if I had the tremendous penalty-weight, as the racing-men say, of being his wife. I really do not know why it is that the noblest sort of women do not excite love. I wonder why it is? I asked my father once; he said, “Because the devil dowers his own daughters.” But that explains nothing; we all know there is no devil; there are women—and women. That is all.’

As those thoughts drifted dreamily through her mind she was conversing all the while about classic music with a potentate who was no mean dilettante in melody, and she was looking down her table at the young face of Yseulte with a vague sort of pity which she could scarcely have explained,—such pity as in the gladiatorial arena some trained and irresistible retiarius might have felt at seeing some fair brave youth enter with the shield that was to be so useless and the sword that was so soon to fail; a pity which might be quite sincere, though it might never go so far as mercy. The faint jealousy which she had felt when, walking amongst the moonlit fields of Zaraïzoff, she had thought of Amyôt, had faded altogether the moment that she had met Othmar again. She knew, as women always know such things, that her power over him was unaltered and unalterable by any will of his own.

‘When I choose,’ she thought, ‘he will leave her and she will break her heart. She will know nothing about such reprisal as a Parisienne should take; she will never be a Parisienne; she will always be a patrician of the vieille souche, which is quite another thing; she will always be an innocent woman, with a soul like a lily. She is afraid of me, and she dislikes me; she tries to hide it all she can, but she does not know how. Platon admires her; that is what he ought to have married; I dare say she would never have found him ugly or clumsy; he would have been her husband—that would have been enough to make him sacred; there are women like that. She adores Othmar, but she knows nothing about him; he is a little like Hamlet, and she is as much puzzled as Ophelia. Of course she would have worshipped any man who had prevented her being buried in a convent; she is as full of life as a lime-tree in flower. She is longing to look at me always, but she does not dare. She is quite beautiful, quite, but all that is no use to her. He knows it, but he does not care for it. He will keep her in his house and have children by her, but he will care no more for her than for Mercié’s Andromache, that stands in his vestibule. Whether you are Venus or a Hottentot matters so little if a man do not love you; if you do not know how to make him love you. They always say a modest woman never does know how; but I do not think I am especially immodest, yet I know——’

The disjointed thoughts drifted through her mind without interfering with the current of her conversation. Metaphysicians may dispute the existence of two simultaneous trains of thought, but women know their possibility.

Her enigmatical victorious smile came on her lips as that consciousness soothed and stimulated her.

She had too much honour to make any deliberate project to seduce him from his allegiance. Her coquetries might be less merciful than many more guilty, but they had never ceased to be innocent in the world’s conception of the term. The coldness with which Othmar had reproached her was still one of the most definite of her qualities. It was the amulet of her magic, the secret of her power. She was as yet a perfectly passionless woman, and as such ruled the passions of men.

‘So, Othmar, like every one else, you find that marriage leads to the world, not to the hidden doves’ nest of the poets?’ said Nadine Napraxine after dinner, when her rooms had filled an hour before midnight, and her imperial guest had gone and left her free.

‘I am afraid it is impossible to avoid following the mould of the society we live in,’ replied Othmar. ‘The hope of being original is one of the many illusions which we leave behind us with time.’

‘I confess that I am a little disappointed in you,’ she continued, with the smile of malice which he knew so well. ‘I should have thought you would have had courage to live your own life, to avoid beaten paths, and to keep your lovely arum lily from the Breton woods out of our forcing-house. Allow me to say it in all simplicity and sincerity, she is most lovely. All Paris envies you.’

Othmar’s face flushed as he bowed in acknowledgment. He did not reply. Though the habits of the world had taught him many such lessons, he found it hard to appear unmoved beside the woman he loved, and discuss with her that other whom he had wedded. She understood quite well the unwillingness and the embarrassment which he felt, and they made her but the more tenacious in pursuit of the subject she had selected.

‘Heavens!’ she thought, ‘what children of Nature men always remain! They are unmanned if they meet a woman who recalls a love scene ten years old, whilst a woman would not move an eyelash if she encountered a score of lovers she had forsaken—no!—not if she had hired bravoes to kill them, and they knew it!’

Aloud she said, in her sweetest voice: ‘I remember you were always so haunted with ideals. You must certainly have realised the most spiritual and the purest of them now. When I heard people say that you were going to shut yourself up in your country house in the Orléannais, it seemed to me perfectly natural, perfectly fitting; you never cared for society. Why should you contaminate your young wife with it? I thought you were going to show us that an idyllic life was still possible. We are all sad sceptics, but we should have believed you. Why did you lose so good an opportunity? To live in Paris, to receive and be received; any one can do that; toute la gomme does it; Amyôt ought to have given you something better.’

‘To live in the country needs a clear conscience,’ replied Othmar impatiently, not very well knowing what he said.

‘I hope you have murdered nobody,’ said his tormentor. ‘Really, without compliment, I should have thought you were one of the few men who could have lived in the country without ennui. You love books, you like your own company, and you are not enamoured of that of others. Besides, it is really a pity to bring that young angel,—that clear-eyed saint,—into our feverish world. She will only lose that lovely complexion, and perhaps her health as well, learn a great deal of folly, and feel thirty years old before she is twenty. Why do you do it? It is heartless of you. Amyôt is her world.’

He did not attempt to reply.

She had spoken with sincerity, though her motive in speaking was not so sincere as her sentiment. Nadine Napraxine, who herself often regretted the premature womanhood which the manner of her childhood had brought so early to her, who often sighed restlessly, if disdainfully, for that innocence of mind, that freshness of heart which she had never enjoyed—the blue cornflower of Louise of Prussia, the green fields of Eugénie de Guerin,—felt at that moment the impulse of compassion which she expressed. It seemed to her, momentarily at least, cruel to have brought any creature so youthful and so easily contented by simple things, as Yseulte was, into the furnace of the world, where all simple tastes and fancies perish like a handful of meadow daisies cast into a brazier.

‘And to have brought her near me!’ she thought, with the singular union of disdain and of compassion with which she had looked for the first time at the face of the child in the salons of Millo. Whilst he remained silent she looked at him a little curiously, a little contemptuously; with no pity whatever for him.

‘One day, when I was ten years old, I was in my father’s study,’ she continued with apparent irrelevance. ‘I was very tiresome; he was dictating to three secretaries alternately, and I tormented him with questions. He was so good to me that he could never bear to turn me out; but he threw me an illustrated copy of “Gil Blas.” I became as quiet as a mouse. I was entranced, delighted; I never spoke for two hours—but I do not know that I was the better for it afterwards. “Gil Blas” is not amongst the moral tales of children. I suppose he did not think of that; he only wanted to get rid of me.’

Othmar coloured with anger and self-consciousness. He knew very well that she meant to imply that he sent his wife into the world as Count Platoff had given his daughter ‘Gil Blas.’ Conscience would not allow him a disclaimer, even if a sense of ridicule in her reminiscences, apparently so ill-timed, had permitted him to make one.

‘I do not know that I was any the better,’ continued Nadine Napraxine in the same even, dreamy tones. ‘But I do not know that I was any the worse. Everything depends on temperament. Oh yes, much more than on circumstance, let them say what they will. Temperament is like climate, a thing unalterable. All the forces of men will not make the Nile desert cold, or the Baltic shores tropical. It is so delightful to think that something escapes the carpentering of man! Do you know, when an earthquake asserts itself or a mountain kills people, I can never help saying to myself with pleasure—“Ah-ha! there is something left, then, that they cannot explain away, or regulate, or measure with their pocket-rule, and what a comfort that is!”’

She laughed a little, leaning back in her chair, slowly moving a fan which Watteau had painted for Larghillière.

‘Madame Napraxine,’ answered Othmar bitterly, ‘has always occupied in life the position which Juvenal thought so enviable; she has always watched the tempest and the shipwreck from her own safe couch behind her casement.’

‘Yes, I have,’ she murmured, with a little sigh of self-satisfaction. ‘It is so easy not to go out in bad weather.’

‘May one not be overtaken by it?’

‘Not if one have a good aneroid.’

‘Let us leave metaphor,’ she continued, after a pause; ‘I know you believe in something like the Greek Erinnys; but you may believe me that there is nothing of the kind. We all make our own fates, or our temperaments make them for us. Destiny does not stalk about amongst us unseen, but irresistible, as I know you think it does. I believe there is nothing which befalls us, from a catarrh to a catastrophe, which, if we choose to be honest with ourselves, we may not trace to our own imprudence.’

‘You cannot judge; you have never——’

‘Never had a cold? Oh, indeed I have. If you were to listen to de Thiviers, I am a person on whom the most southerly wind should never be allowed to blow, for fear of its blowing through me and annihilating me; as for catastrophe——’

She paused a moment; across even her profound indifference there passed the memories of some dead men.

‘Catastrophes,’ added Othmar; ‘catastrophes have not been lacking in the pageant of your life, madame; but I believe they have only been the shipwrecks seen through the windows of rose-glass.’

She was silent. Then she said slowly and in a low voice:

‘You mistake if you think that I did not feel pain for the death of Seliedoff.’

Othmar bent his head. She saw that he did not believe her. The sense of being misjudged banished her momentarily chastened mood.

‘But I was at the same time very much annoyed,’ she continued. ‘Tragedy always annoys me. It sets the asses of the world braying. No one ever pleases me by irrational or exaggerated actions. I am sorry, of course, but I cannot forgive the uproar which all conduct of—of that sort causes me. It always irritates me like the conflagration in the cantata of the ‘Dernière Nuit de Sardanapale,’ where the grosse caisse always roars and rolls so loud that all the music is lost, and one does not feel to care in the very least who may die or who may live.’

Then she rose and gave him a little smile.

‘I assure you the grosse caisse is a mistake in a cantata!’ she said as she passed him and left him, the subtle, voluptuous odour of the gardenias of her bouquet floating by him like the dewy odours of a midsummer eve.

He thought bitterly that he could comprehend how such a man as Joubert loved the scent of tube-roses till his death, because a woman once had taken a cluster of them from his hand twenty years before in a garden alley of the Tuileries.

It irritated him extremely that she should so exactly have suspected and penetrated the motive which had led him to desire that the life of the world should distract and occupy the young companion of his life. It was a motive of which he was acutely ashamed, which he could not endure to confess to himself, much less could bear to feel was subject to the observation of her unsparing raillery. Of all wounds which she could have reopened, none would have ached more keenly in him than his humiliating sense of how she, at the least, must know that the young girl who bore his name had no place in his heart; that she, at the least, must remember, as he remembered, those interviews with her at La Jacquemerille which had been so closely followed by his marriage. He might deceive all the world into the belief that he loved his wife—he could not so deceive her. His veins thrilled, his blood burned, as he recalled those two days in which his passion had been spoken to her in words whose utterance he himself could never forget. What had they sounded to her ear? Only, no doubt, like the grosse caisse which, symbolising death, agony, destruction, woe untellable, yet only seemed to her grotesquely forcible, jarring unpleasantly on the harmonious serenity of the symphony!

He forced himself not to follow her with his eyes as she moved away with that exquisite harmony of step and carriage which were due to the perfect proportions of her form, and he turned and sought out Yseulte herself.

She was in the music-room, listening absently to an andante of Beethoven’s, surrounded by a little court of men no longer young, who cared nothing for Beethoven, but much for her youth and her unconscious charm of manner.

‘Are you willing to come away?’ he murmured to her when the andante was ended.

She rose with eagerness; to be in the Hôtel Napraxine was oppressive and painful to her.

He took her away unobserved, and drove homeward beside her in silence. He looked at her profile, fair and clear against the light thrown from without on the glass of the carriage window, and at the whiteness of her slender throat, with its collar of pearls, and hated himself because he could only think, with a shudder, ‘All my life must I sit beside her, a living lie to her!’

‘Yseulte,’ he murmured suddenly; then paused: he felt a momentary impulse to tell her the truth, to say to her, ‘I do not love you—God forgive me!—I love another woman; help me, my dear, and pity me; do not reproach me; I will do the best that I can by your life; love me always yourself if you can; I need it sorely. We may never be happy; but at least there will be no falsehood or secrecy between us. That will be much.’

The impulse was momentarily strong upon him; he took her hand in his and said once more with hesitation: ‘Yseulte——’

Then he paused; long habit of reserve, a sensitive fear of wounding and of being wounded, the tenderness of pity for a blameless creature who adored him and who, if he spoke his thoughts aloud, would never lie in peace upon his heart again, all checked the words which had risen to his lips.

He sighed, kissed her hand, and murmured some vague caressing phrase. The moment passed; the impulse of confidence and candour lost strength and courage. ‘It would be cruel,’ he thought. ‘Since I have made my burden, let me at least have courage to bear it alone.’

It seemed to him unmanly and ungenerous to lay any share or shadow of it on this young life, which owed all its peace and light to ignorance of the truth. She was deluded, but she was happy: he let her be. He shrank from arousing her; he shrank from hurting her; she was like a child, doomed to starve on her awaking, but whilst she slept, dreaming, with a smile, that she was fed by bread from heaven.